Externals — the bridge board
Will fail at least as often as the disk behind it. The drive is good, nothing can get to it. Send the entire unit.
Very common
The fact that hardware encryption lives on the enclosure and not the disk, that some drives were recorded with shingled recording but never so labelled, and that there are helium filled sealed units that can't be opened by conventional means, each alter both what can be done for you and what you should avoid doing.
WD installs hardware encryption into the USB bridge, and they have the option turned on, with no password ever being set. It's not apparent until the disk is removed from the board containing its key — and the board appears to be the packaging.
The most consequential and the most commonly self-inflicted.
Most modern My Passport and My Book units use hardware-based encryption for their contents, even if someone didn't create a password. The encryption process is done via the small USB bridge board inside the enclosure. The key material is stored on that board — not on the disk.
This results in a disk full of ciphertext; when connected directly, with no enclosure, Windows reads it as unformatted and offers to initialise it, and accepting damages a drive that was perfectly healthy. The worst part of all is that once the enclosure is discarded, there is nothing left to decrypt what's on the disk.
If you've already done it: keep the enclosure and board and send both. Without it, recovery will be substantially more difficult (if possible).
There are several types of Western Digital drives that exhibit this behaviour, and it affects how failures occur and how long it takes to recover data from a failed drive.
Western Digital uses shingled magnetic recording to create a roof tile effect where adjacent tracks overlap, which increases density. This doesn't impact reading data, but does impact writing data. When writing data to a single track it is necessary to rewrite the tracks that overlap it, so the data is written to a cache first and then reordered after the fact.
Two outcomes matter. That cache can be exhausted by sustained writes – either a big restore, or a RAID rebuild. At that point, throughput will collapse drastically and the drive could possibly appear to fail. It was a problem when they used SMR drives in NAS arrays and WD received severe criticism in 2020 for shipping SMR in Red drives which they marketed as being suitable for exactly that purpose and did not disclose it.
During recovery, imaging an SMR drive is slower because of a more complex translation between logical addresses and physical tracks, and a drive with an interrupted background reorganisation may have data in its cache which has not yet made its way to its final location.
On larger capacity drives, relevant; also determines who can work on them.
WD and HGST high capacity drives contain helium and are hermetically sealed. Helium is less dense than air. Therefore, the heads fly with less turbulent motion and there is room for more platters in the same vertical space — which allowed for 14TB and above.
The seal is the point. Once broken the helium escapes and cannot simply be replaced; these can never be opened on a standard bench and closed again. Therefore, work on them requires a controlled environment specifically for that purpose. It may also be worth asking directly whether a firm has the capability to handle helium units before sending one.
If the problem with a drive is electronic or firmware rather than mechanical, none of this applies – the drive never needs opening. And those are the most common problems regardless of capacity.
Will fail at least as often as the disk behind it. The drive is good, nothing can get to it. Send the entire unit.
These were built for continuous operation. So faults will tend to show up as a degraded array nobody was monitoring instead of a single dead disk.
The drive spins normally and reports zero capacity or a blank model. This indicates that the drive is unable to identify itself, but the data is untouched.
Grinding noises, clicking, seized bearings. A donor for a drive with matching family, firmware revision and head configuration may be needed. The use of helium inside the drive also makes for special requirements regarding handling.
No. Most current My Passport and My Book models encrypt in hardware using the key stored on the USB bridge board. Therefore, a bare disk read back will appear as unformatted even though the drive is operational — at which point Windows will prompt the user to initialise it, thus damaging a working drive.
Recovering information is much more difficult and sometimes impossible since the bridge board contained the encryption keys. If you can locate the case/enclosure associated with the drive, please do so. Even if the case/enclosure seems to be physically damaged, send both items together.
Shingled magnetic recording uses track overlap to add capacity to the same footprint as other drives. Once its internal write cache is full, that means sustained writes will be significantly slower. In 2020 WD received criticism because they were marketing some Red NAS models using SMR and did not disclose the fact. Check your model number.
Yes; however, mechanical work requires a controlled environment built for the purpose, since the seal cannot just be broken and remade. If there has been a fault with the electronics or firmware of a unit, you may never need to open the unit at all.
This is why you should not consider the bridge board simply as a part of an adapter. The bridge board does both interface translation and hardware-based encryption so it is also the first point where damage from knocks, cable pulls etc. occur, along with power fluctuations.
Single drive or external WD recovery costs start from £300 + VAT. NAS & array recovery starts from £500 + VAT. Both come after a free 48-hour diagnostic. Please send units complete with enclosures if sending an external unit.