**UPDATE**
After tinkering around with the original hard drive in the new housing attached to the PC, I was able to use Microsoft’s disk utilities to re-initialize and ultimately reformat the drive. Of course, I lost everything on it (which was fortunately just stuff I can redownload) but at least at this point I am able to still use the drive for other things, or my Xbox again, instead of being the proud owner of a useless chunk of silicone and metal.

**Original Story Below**

I learned an interesting thing about Western Digital external hard drives this past week. It’s a useful tidbit that most people should probably know, yet never seem to realize until it’s too late. I’ll go into it in a moment, but first, a little back story!

I’ve had a 4 TB Western Digital MyBook attached to my Xbox One since it launched. I read all the news articles and I knew 500 GB wasn’t going to be enough. So I bought the MyBook and never looked back. It’s been great, and the capacity has afforded me to download anything I want without having to worry about cleaning house. I amassed quite the collection of purchased games, Games With Gold titles, backward compatible games I owned, and stuff I downloaded through Game Pass. In all I had about 150+ games installed, with another 160+ in my Ready To Install list. If they were physical copies I’d have been rolling around in bed with them like Demi Moore. It was a wonderful, blissful existence. Then the unthinkable happened.

Without going into too much detail on the incident, the room I have my gaming setup in is on the second floor of our home and in this room, there is an access “door” to the attic space. This “door” is literally a piece of plywood screwed to the wall to cover the hole. It’s ugly as shit, so I had my gaming setup covering this part of the wall. We had a storm, which caused a leak, which forced me to remove it and get in there. I pulled the table containing my setup away from the wall, which wasn’t difficult.

I did what I needed to do in the attic, but knew I needed to get back in there eventually, so I left the “door” propped up against the wall. There was literally no reason to believe this was harmful.

While out of the room, I heard a crash. I went in there to see that the “door” had fallen over onto the floor. The problem was, it was just high enough to catch a wire hanging down from the back of my gaming setup. That wire belonged to my external hard drive, and it gave it a damn good yank, pulling my hard drive off the table and unplugging the USB from both the Xbox and the My Book.

My initial “aw shit” reaction came and went as I picked up the hard drive. I’ve knocked it over before, and it’s been fine. But when I tried to plug the USB back in is when I had my real “aw shit fuck motherfucker sonuvabitch” moment. The USB port in the back of the hard drive was a mangled piece of aluminum and there was no straightening it out.

I’ve had external casings fail on me before, and I’ve cracked off the proprietary casing and did a transplant and everything was hunky-dory. So I did. I got my screwdriver and did my operation, which I admit is pretty satisfying sometimes, not having to worry about breaking something (most of the time those cases are designed to not come apart once they’ve been snapped together).

I transplanted the hard drive into a spare external housing I had, and plugged it in.

Nothing.

The hard drive was spinning, and I could hear it scrubbing, but the Xbox wasn’t even registering it as being plugged in. I plugged it into the PC, and still nothing. So I did some reasearch online, which is where I learned the aforementioned tidbit of information.

Western Digital has apparently been encrypting their external hard drives for a few years now. The housing they come in includes a chip that decrypts the hard drive and allows it to be readable by devices. Without it, they’re practically useless unless you want to do some cracking on a Linux setup with some software specifially designed to extract the encryption key from Western Digital hard drives. Yes, this apparently happens enough that someone wrote software for it.

The thing is, I really don’t feel like installing and brushing up on my Linux just to get my hard drive working again. I haven’t actually lost anything, I just have to re-install my games. Personally, I think it’s bullshit that I’d have to. While it’s my own damn fault that my hard drive housing failed, that’s not always the case. These things fail all the time. Sometimes the power supply craps out, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Back in the day we just transplanted the hard drive to a new housing and went on with our day. Now we either have to crack the encryption or order a new housing from Western Digital. 

I’m not purchasing another WD external hard drive. I’ll purchase an internal hard drive and use my current housing. But it’s also got me really fucking paranoid about my other WD externals, that have actual important stuff on them.

I’ve always liked WD. In my experience, they’ve always been pretty reliable *knocks on every piece of wood I can find.* But I’m thinking I might be done with them after this. I can’t have my data virtually locked away by someone else if something ever happens, especially when WD doesn’t inform you up front that this happens.

From now on, I’ll assemble my own externals. Until I do though, I’m stuck with the limited storage space of my XBO, which is only 1 TB. Needless to say I have to be selective of what I install for the first time this generation.