Is WD hardware encryption good?

Is WD hardware encryption good?

No encryption, it locks the hard drive so data cannot be accessed, this is done by a chip on the hard drive controller board, they are very hard to break into if you do not have the password, some makes/models are impossible even by data recovery/crack experts. The stronger the password the harder it is to crack it.

What is WD My Passport Ultra?

Welcome to your My Passport Ultra™ portable hard drive. This drive offers high capacity in a sleek portable device. It features ultra-fast USB 3.1 connectivity, local and cloud backup, and password protection to help protect your files from unauthorized use.

What is a My Passport?

My Passport is a series of portable external hard drives and solid state drives produced by Western Digital. My Passport drives are designed to look like and be the size of a passport, none of the drives in the passport series require a power socket although the “elite editions” feature a docking system.

Are WD hard drives encrypted?

Even if you don’t lock the disk, it is still encrypted! That being said, several data recovery companies are now able to recover data from broken WD encrypted hard disks under certain conditions (either user password is known or not set).

Are WD external hard drives encrypted?

The hardware-based encryption built into popular Western Digital external hard disk drives has flaws that could allow attackers to recover data without knowing the user password.

Is WD Passport encrypted?

WD My Passport external drives – Data recovery from encrypted disks. WD My Passport drives feature hardware disk encryption. As long as people do not have your password, they will not be able to steal your data. You may assume, that only after you set a password, you’re data gets encrypted.

How do I set up WD Security?

To change the security settings for your drive in the future, launch the WD Security utility and enter your password. Select the “Change Password” radio button and reconfigure your password and password hint as needed. Click “Update Security Settings” to confirm.

Is there 256 bit encryption on WD portable drives?

A data recovery company was able to take a WD USB drive that had a 256 bit Hardware Encryption password set and get the data off it. The video specifically mentions the drives firmware on the circuit board was corrupt and they replaced the circuit board with a normal SATA board and copied some information from the old to the new board.

Can a 256 bit encryption be used on a USB drive?

By the way, this YouTube video was interesting. A data recovery company was able to take a WD USB drive that had a 256 bit Hardware Encryption password set and get the data off it.

What kind of encryption does Western Digital use?

WD’s My Passport boxes automatically encrypt data as it is written to disk and decrypt the data as it is read back to the computer. The devices use 256-bit AES encryption, and can be password-protected: giving the correct password enables the data to be successfully accessed.

Is the WD passport Ultra a SED drive?

So it appears that the Passport Ultra is an SED of sorts and the WD Secure software handles the password management on the drive. But I still cannot find where WD clearly identifies their drives as Self-Encrypting Drives as specified by the Trusted Computing Group standards and that they are qualified to the NIST FIPS 140-2 standard.