WD Passport Essential encryption in Linux

[arch3angel at gmail.com (Robert Miller)]

Robin,

I have not seen any sort of hardware encryption on this drive or my 
previous 120GB version of the same drive.  I even took the entire 120GB 
drive apart to "see" what made it tick and nothing.  It was nothing more 
than a SATA laptop drive with a very basic SATA to USB 2.0 converter 
board.  I have never used their provided software nor have I run it 
since it is Windows based, so this software may magically turn the 
switch to the on position of this converter board and provide hardware 
level encryption but I doubt it.

As far as price I got lucky in that I hit a sale on newegg.com for the 
400GB one for something like $69 USD with free shipping.

This issue with Linux support did concern me and was the main factor for 
me going to Truecrypt since it is cross platform.

- Robert
(arch3angel)

On 12/31/2009 5:25 AM, Robin Wood wrote:
> 2009/12/30 Robert Miller<arch3angel at gmail.com>:
>    
> > I went with the basic WD Passport Essential USB 2.0 Part Number
> > WD4000ME-00 and just used Truecrypt, protected the entire space as a
> > single partition with a really long passphrase.
> >
> > I did this so I could use it under Windows and Linux because I found
> > little information on the topic when i researched it.
> >
> > Hope this helps,
> >      
> That means you are ignoring the hardware encryption, if I were going
> to do that I'd save the ?10 difference and go for the Elements drive.
>
> The lack of linux support tallies with all the other research I've done.
>
> Robin
>
>    
> > - Robert
> > (arch3angel)
> >
> > On 12/29/2009 11:33 AM, Robin Wood wrote:
> >      
> > > I'm looking at getting a WD portable harddrive and my choice is
> > > between the Essential and the Elements. The Essential has hardware
> > > encryption but I can only find reference to it working under Windows
> > > and Mac. Does anyone have one and know anything about its Linux
> > > compatibility or lack thereof?
> > >
> > > Robin
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