Western Digital externals behave unlike any other brand in one important respect: on most modern My Passport and My Book units the encryption key lives on the bridge board, not the disk. Take the disk out and it becomes unreadable.
WD builds hardware encryption into the USB bridge and enables it by default, with no password set. You never see it — until the disk is separated from the board that holds its key.
Inside a My Passport is an ordinary 2.5-inch drive and a small USB bridge board. That board performs AES encryption transparently, with a key derived and stored on the board itself, and it is active by default even when you have never set a password. In normal use it is invisible. It matters only at the point of failure, because the disk and the board become a matched pair — a working disk behind a dead bridge is unreadable, and so is that disk in any other enclosure or dock.
This is why WD externals must be sent whole. A bridge that has failed can often be repaired or its key material recovered, but only if the original board arrives with the disk.
Silent, no light, nothing detected — usually the bridge or its power circuitry, with the disk intact behind it. Detected but prompting to format, or showing as RAW — often the bridge failing partially, or file-system damage, and again the disk is generally sound. Clicking, ticking, or spinning up and down — that is the mechanism, and the correct response is to unplug it and stop.
The useful test is free: a different cable and a different port. It rules out the commonest trivial cause in under a minute, and if the behaviour is identical on both, the fault is inside the unit.
Internal WD drives are recovered like any other: a failed board is repaired or swapped with the original ROM adaptives migrated across, failed heads are replaced from a matched donor under filtered air, and firmware faults are addressed in the service area until the drive enumerates at its true capacity. Reds are NAS drives and usually arrive as part of an array rather than alone; Purples are surveillance drives from DVR and NVR units, where the recorder’s proprietary file system has to be carved rather than mounted.
A single WD drive, internal or external, is from £300 +VAT; where the unit is part of a NAS or RAID set it is from £500 +VAT. Every job opens with a free 48-hour diagnostic and a written quote, and most are no fix, no fee — clean-air or donor work carries a 50% deposit with the balance payable only on success. Send external units complete with the enclosure and the original cable if you still have it.
Because the encryption key lives on the USB bridge board rather than the disk. WD enables hardware encryption by default on My Passport and most recent My Book units, so a bare disk removed from its enclosure reads as unformatted even though the data is perfectly intact. Always send these drives whole.
Often not. A silent, undetected WD external is more commonly a failed bridge board than a failed disk. Try a different cable and port first; if the behaviour is unchanged the fault is inside the unit, and the disk behind the bridge is frequently healthy.
No. Beyond the encryption issue, a bare disk connected to Windows may be offered for initialising, and accepting that writes to a drive that was fine. Leave the unit assembled and have it diagnosed.
Disconnect it and leave it off. Clicking means the heads are failing or contacting the platters, and every further power-on widens the damage. This is a clean-air job with donor parts, not something a cable change or software will fix.
From £300 plus VAT for a single internal or external WD drive, and from £500 plus VAT where it forms part of a NAS or RAID set. Fixed in a written quote after a free 48-hour diagnostic; most jobs are no fix, no fee.