Does Western Digital external HDD's "Hardware encryption" works at the time , in dying stage of hard disk drive ?

[koningx]

Does Western Digital Hardware encryption for it's external drives works at the time , in dying stage of hard disk drive ?,

i.e. when the hard disk is on the verge of about to die
(in the later dying stage of it's life)
i mean, able to access the contents of drive, unlock it by putting password
so as to retrieve and backup if some remaining data quickly from it, before it finally dies.

or is it that, when WD hard disk is dying out,
hardware encryption may get corrupt. and thus then you can't unlock the drive and access it.

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

Obvious way to find out -- and as soon as possible judging from your post - - is to get the data copied to another drive before it's too late.

 

[koningx]

No actually i was thinking to buy a new external drive a Western digital one.

But i was skeptical and doubtful about the whole Western Digital "Hardware encryption" thing,
since as it's a firware level thing on chip on the hard drive controller board,
or contains an AES encryption chip whose circuitry is optimized for applying AES encryption to ALL data to and from the drive.

But what if that disk is in the dying stages of it's life or What if AES circuitry were damaged or fried at later stages.

Retrieving the data will get more complicated then i guess.

i had used Seagete Backup plus in past and encrypted using Truecrypt and kept my eye on S.M.A.R.T attributes.
software level encryption.