How secure is My Passport Drive?

WD External and Portable SSD Portable SSD
1

Who knows?

How does 256-bit hardware-based encryption works on My Passport drive and  how secure is data protected from unauthorized access?
What is encrypted, password or data on the drive? 
Will it by any means be possible to go round the the password to access files such as documents, pictures or videos?

WD does not tell much about these things.

Thank You

2

I’m curious about the same sorts of things. Specifically, my questions regarding the hardware encryption are:

  1. what is AES encrypted when password protection is turned on? everything on the disk? just the user’s password? (some HDDs encrypt the password but use simple XOR “encryption” when encrypting the drive’s contents)

  2. what block cipher mode of operation is used? (ECB would be my guess … is that correct?)

  3. how about anti-hammering? I.e., does the drive disallow repeated password guessing?