Western Digital (WD) is among the most widely recognised brands for both internal and external storage devices, such as drives inside NAS boxes and PCs, My Passport, and Elements portable hard drives. WD recoveries are routine; however, two significant things should be known prior to proceeding with any recovery attempts: WD’s My Passport external drives have an encryption mechanism enabled as a default setting; additionally, while WD Red series drives may function normally within a NAS environment, some do not perform optimally when rebuilding data within those same environments.
WD uses colour coding to identify each of their various types of drives based upon the intended application of each drive, from consumer level to enterprise-level, and also encrypts all of their My Passport portable external drives by default. Recovering data from WD drives is a normal process. The single most important item to note when recovering data from any WD encrypted portable external drive is to send the entire enclosure intact. This is because the encryption key remains housed inside the enclosure itself.
WD colour codes all of their drives by category. WD Blue is the mainstream desktop drive; WD Black is the high-performance line; WD Red is designed for use within Network Attached Storage (NAS) systems; WD Purple is designed for surveillance recorders; and WD Gold and Ultrastar (which was originally an HGST product) are used in servers and data centres. On the portable side, My Passport and Elements are two of the leading brands of portable external hard drives globally. And since WD acquired both SanDisk and HGST, many of these products fall under the same umbrella. As with every other manufacturer, which model WD drive you own will determine how we will recover that data. Recovering a single WD Blue desktop drive will likely be less complicated than recovering a RAID rebuild of multiple WD Reds from a NAS system.
This is the most important factor to understand regarding recovery of your WD portable drive. All My Passport drives and most new models of Elements drives have hardware based encryption inside the USB bridge chip of the drive’s enclosure. These chips encrypt the data on the drive automatically after they leave the factory regardless of whether or not you’ve established a password. While this represents a good security feature, there are some very significant implications toward recovery. If your drive no longer mounts and you either yourself or through a computer repair service remove the drive from its enclosure and connect just the bare disk to another machine, the disk will appear to be empty or unformatted. This is because the decryption keys live inside the electronic components of the enclosure. As such, a WD My Passport disk and its enclosure represent a single unit and should never be “shucked” for recovery purposes. Instead, please ship us the entire unit intact so we may properly access and recover your encrypted files.
WD drives installed in a NAS do have one significant caveat. There was an issue with certain WD Reds (non-Pro models) at some point in time; they had been built with SMR (shingled magnetic recording), a method for writing data that will write more densely, but much slower. This may result in a RAID rebuild being very long and/or timing out; or failing due to the timed-out build. Anytime a WD Red array fails and will not rebuild, the reasons mentioned above are part of why, and also why you should not force a rebuild; recovery of the WD Red array should be done as per our guides for a drive that won’t show up, and for failed arrays generally. The cost of recovering a WD Red NAS or RAID failure starts from £500 +VAT.
WD drives can fail as other drives do. WD drives typically suffer from standard failure types including issues with heads/motors, bad sectors, or board damage caused by electrical surge. The normal methodology for recovering WD drives includes as little “repair” as possible to allow the drive to be read and create a read-only disk image, therefore allowing all data to come from a copy and placing no further stress upon the original drive. The cost of recovering a single WD internal drive or My Passport starts from £300 +VAT. The cost of recovering a WD Red NAS/RAID set starts from £500 +VAT. We provide complimentary diagnostics and fixed written quotes prior to starting work; and, as always, in most cases you only pay if we recover your data.
Yes, however the drive itself has to be received as a whole. This is because a My Passport, by default, encrypts the information in the encryption bridge located inside the enclosure. If the drive is removed from its casing (shucked) you will see that there is no data on the drive itself, or it will appear unformatted and cannot be recovered on its own, since the decryption key is still inside the enclosure. We can assess your drive, free of charge, and provide you a quote for recovering your data after we have received the entire drive. Our prices start at £300 + VAT for this service.
It is hardware encrypted. WD’s portable drives (such as My Passport) encrypt their content through the USB bridge. Therefore the disk and enclosure are a “matched” pair: if you pull the disk out of its housing, you leave behind the decryption key, therefore rendering the data unreadable. Therefore please send us the full unit for us to recover your data instead of trying to shuck the disk yourself.
Yes. First, the disks are imaged read only; next the RAID array is rebuilt off-line from these image files. One thing to keep in mind: WD Red models, depending on model number, may utilise a technology called SMR. SMR can greatly prolong the amount of time a rebuild takes or may even prevent it altogether, which is another reason not to force a rebuild. In light of this, we would appreciate it if you could send us all the disks, each labelled with its bay position. NAS & RAID recovery services begin at £500 + VAT.
Usually, yes, but do not use it again. If your WD drive is clicking, or produces no sound at all when turned on, there is a mechanical fault, such as a stuck motor or worn heads. Each time you turn it on, you risk causing more damage, and software will not solve the issue. Power it off immediately and send it to us for read-only recovery on the bench. A single drive costs from £300 plus VAT.
The price for a single WD internal drive or My Passport external drive starts from £300 plus VAT, and a WD Red NAS or RAID set from £500 plus VAT. The exact price varies with the fault, which we identify during our complimentary diagnostic, and we confirm it in a fixed written quote once the diagnostic has been completed. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data.
Dead My Passport, clicking WD Blue or a WD Red array down? Please send it in (with any external whole) and we will let you know what can be recovered from your drive. We offer a free diagnostic followed by a fixed quote.