Thought I had thanked you all and finished, but there is one more related issue.

This business about WD My Book external drives which encrypt data stored on them has caused quite a few complaints, at least on sites like Amazon. Apparently when they fail and people try to use the HD outside of its failed enclosure, the data is not accessible. It remains encrypted. Unfortunately, I have a few of these. The "Elements" version and other brands do not (I think) have this issue. I believe the enablers for that encryption are contained in the case, not the HD itself. My questions:
- Is this all so?
- If I transfer data from these My Books back to the PC, that data is not encrypted on the PC HD, right? (At least that's what I've seen)
- If I remove the empty HD from the MyBook enclosure and reuse the HD, it will be just another normal HD?

I recently had to rebuild one of our capture boxes. Rather than buy new drives, I decided to remove a pair of WD MyBook Studio USB2 drives (formatted NTFS), since I had retired them last year. Those hot/noisy MyBooks were replaced by cool/large/quiet Seagate 5tb USB3, so the data was long since copied to new media.

I removed the drives, added the 7/8 pin jumper for XP (WD EARS/4k drive), and just reformatted it. It's fine.

I did try to load the drive first, to see what data was on it, but it showed as uninitialized. But it have data on it.

Yeah.. I'm a bit of a Time Lord.. I Lord it over people how Time has passed them by.. and hord my secret cache of standalone eSATA enclosures with trayless quick load and hot swap 3.5 inch HGST drives.

One thing about "Shingle" tech and 4K sectors you should be aware of though.. they are basically running software RAID on a single drive.. swapping good for bad sectors all the time, recycling internally. I'm still a bit Leary of trusting them.

But.. old fashioned 512K drives are starting to get rare.. all the more reason to duplicate all your data and keep it in constant motion.. like Mr. Scott in that transporter buffer in Next Gen.. they don't mak'em like they use too.

"... to Synthetic Scotch.. and Synthetic Commanders. cheers"

Is there a Doctor in the house? :wink2:

Is this the same issue as with some early >2TB external drives (I believe only WDs) had 8K sectors and the USB interface presented them as 4K to the OS for XP MBR compatibility? You could shuck the drive, but the data was inaccessible.

-- merged --

Just remembered. I had two drives, both 2.5" externals that weren't 100% the same as their internal counterparts. Both were smaller than 1TB, I think 500GB & 320GB. The 500GB was a Seagate that once shucked was completely inaccessible. It couldn't even be re-formatted as the larger drives could. The smaller drive was a WD where the USB interface was directly soldered to the drives mainboard. I tossed both drives.

To clarify, this is the case as well with current WD My Book drives vs. their Elements version of the external USB drives.

Ah...you're right! Just remembered I had the issue with one of my 8TB MyBooks a couple of years ago. I forgot all about it since I now immediately shuck the drive as soon as I'm ready to use it.

FYI, from my experience and reports from others, removing the drive from the case doesn't void the warranty since the warranty is on the drive itself. Just to be safe, I always return to drive to the case as best I can before sending it for RMA

We actually capture to an external USB 3.0 drive on one of our setups. Haven't had any issues with that, but YMMV. Even done it a few times to a USB 2.0 drive but that's a bit more dodgy I guess.