Reformat GPT 3tera disk

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viroman50

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Dec 8, 2015
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Hi,
WD MyBook with 3tera disk has been purchased in november 2015.
I think it is formatted as usual by WD with MBR and
advanced format (512e) with some electronics to bridge
sector 512 bytes and 4 kbytes.
I want to be absolutely sure that I could pull out and
insert the disk directly on SATA port of a computer
with BIOS (not UEFI !) and SATA controller
enough capable of managing such a disk.
To achieve this is sufficient reformatting GPT with
512 bytes or 4kbytes per sector ?
 
Solution
JaredDM
Don't bet on that. 90% of them are encrypted. It's so that if you later set a password it doesn't have to go back and re-encrypt the data all over again. The only ones that aren't encrypted are the ones that are sold in countries where data encryption is illegal. It's not software encryption, so it doesn't matter if you've reformatted, renamed it, etc. The encryption is hardware and is actually handled by a chip on the little board that converts the SATA to USB.

Trust me I run a data recovery company and deal with these on a weekly basis.
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JaredDM

JaredDM

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Jul 8, 2015
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WD drives almost always emulate 512byte sectors even though in reality they are all now 4K sector size. It was only the earliest ones that didn't do the emulating yet. You should have no issue with it on an older system.

Do keep in mind though that the WD My Books encrypt the data and if you direct SATA connect it you won't be able to access the old data that's on it.
 
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viroman50

Reputable
Dec 8, 2015
2
0
4,510
Thank you JaredDM.
My Book model is named "absolutely", so I don't think it has
an automatic out of the box encryption.
Do you really mean that I can format GPT, use the device
in the external USB case from WD, pull out and connect to
internal SATA port without losing data ?
Thanks for your time
 
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JaredDM

JaredDM

Honorable
Jul 8, 2015
716
2
11,665
Don't bet on that. 90% of them are encrypted. It's so that if you later set a password it doesn't have to go back and re-encrypt the data all over again. The only ones that aren't encrypted are the ones that are sold in countries where data encryption is illegal. It's not software encryption, so it doesn't matter if you've reformatted, renamed it, etc. The encryption is hardware and is actually handled by a chip on the little board that converts the SATA to USB.

Trust me I run a data recovery company and deal with these on a weekly basis.
 
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