I have recently been shopping for a portable hard drive and found a Western Digital that claims on the package to have 256 bit hardware encryption built in. After downloading and viewing the instructions it appears to need administrator rights to unlock the drive. I thought I remembered reading that drives with hardware encryption could be unlocked without administrator rights, unless I misunderstood. The model number of the drive I was WDBAAA3200BK if I remember correctly. I was also looking at a Western Digital WDME3200TK (if I remembered that one also). I also downloaded the manual for this one, but could find no real indication that one had to be logged in as an administrator to unlock it. If anyone who uses one of these drives could shed some light on this I would greatly appreciate it. I did a search of this site and came up empty, unless I did not use the correct term to search for
Thank in advance
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the think with entering password under admin rights only is simply 'suboptimal engineering' to express it poligtly.
However, it is in fact not so simple task, to send something to a hardware device directly from restricted user account. Sure the simple way it would need software preinstalled to handle this. But solutions are available even without preinstalled software.
I have a flash stick, having same problem, entering pw only under admin, then the rest works under restricted.
Then try to search also internet for infos. There were number of strange 'hardware encryption' on external hard drives. Some of them did actually encrypt the traffic between the hard drive controller and the usb interface, but not the data on the disk itself. In some computer magazin there was an article where someone analyzed encryption to the actual disk writes, but found very soon that this was done just by XORing all data with same bit pattern of few bytes all over the drive.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland