Hi Everyone,
Just to share my experience, my credentials are, I am a senior network administrator in CO. I bought a WD My Book USB 2TB external drive a couple of years ago so the drive performed well up until the beginning of last month. When the drive letter would not show up when I would plugged the drive into my desktop computer. I had a ton of my childrens photos on there, which is irreplacable by any means.
The drive did how ever show up under device manager though. I just could not access my data on it. I did a months worth of troubleshooting and research from working on it myself to having it evaluated by a data recovery comapny. Turns out that WD encrypts at least for this model that I know for sure on the hard ware level. the USB enclosure card attched to the drive does the encrypting as data passes through it Well, the usb function still worked but the encryption part failed.
Thankyou WD for securing my data soi even I could not access it. I fianally found a really good decryption software that was able to brak through and allow me to recover my precious pictures of my children. WESTERN DIGITAL!! Why the **bleep**!! would you by default encrypt a users data without their permission or letting them know that encryption is a hardware feature of the drive. I did not see it in the specifications online beofre I bought the drive. I bought it from a reputable hardware site too. I am sure there are alot of sad and upset people running into this same situation.
Western Digital you need to be alot nicer to end user’s that may not be as tech savvy. **bleep** you need to remove the encryption or make it an option for the user to engage if they choose. I was just trying to save memmories of my children and you almost ruined that for me. I will be very slow to buy myself or reccomend WD drives for my work place in the future. A very unhappy, disatisfied, used to be Western Digital customer.
