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Comment by aeleos | Hacker News Reader

I always wondered they were able to sell these devices so cheaply. I recently bought 2 4tb ones to take the hard drives out as they were each $30 cheaper than buying a regular 4tb hardrive.

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I pulled some old MyBook hard drives out of their cases and discovered they were unreadable via a standard SATA connection. They were older MyBooks designed for XP, so I thought it was just having trouble because they were using 4k sectors.

I found some information that claimed the older MyBooks would AES encrypt the data (even if you never setup a password) making the data totally inaccessible if the factory enclosure ever broke.

Fuck that shit. I pulled the drive back in and copied everything off, then formatted the disk from a real PC and threw that shit away. Today I always buy separate disks and enclosures that allow direct disk access.

I bet they do the encryption like that so that you can quickly securely wipe them (just drop the encryption key) or easily add a password to the encryption later (just encrypt the encryption key by a password). It's too bad if it's completely unusable without the enclosure, but that general technique is one that I'm a huge fan of.

If the claim is true, would you rather someone pull it out and access your data? This is like breaking HSM. So why “fuck that shit”? I hear a lot of people worrying not enough encryption. So perhaps take this as a positive thing??? Having an extra layer of protection is never a bad idea.

Because I didn't ask for it! In fact, I already ran TrueCrypt and LUKS on those drives, so I was encrypting the data myself! But now, if any of the enclosures break (the controllers go bad), I have no way of recovering the data at all! That's a shitty design.

Not everyone cares about encryption first. Personally, I’d rather have my entire HDD published on nytimes.com than lose the data on it.

> Personally, I’d rather have my entire HDD published on nytimes.com than lose the data on it.

If your data is that valuable, surely you were already taking backups/snapshots of it. Right?

What if this is the backup and the enclosure is damaged by some natural disaster but the disk is OK. I guess he should have thought of that possibility, but what if he didn't?

Then this is not really the backup though... I mean it is not a backup if you don't understand it completely.

Yes that'S the entire point of the discussion. Yet people still claim you should backup your backup. But where are you going to backup it to? To another encrypted drive where the enclosure might fail? No you're going to use an unencrypted HDD and be done with it. You can always add encryption on top of an unencrypted HDD.

Sure, I completely agree. It strikes me as unnecessary, however, for a manufacturer to deliberately add a counter-intuitive and indeed dangerous element to a device commonly used for backup. In particular, many home backup systems are not created by experts who might think of things like this.

It turns out that you very often need hard drives to make said backups.

I have a broken MyBook case. I discovered this encryption when I tried to recover the data by connnecting it directly.

If abyobe knows a way to get the data out of it I'm interested to know.

https://github.com/themaddoctor/linux-mybook-tools

https://github.com/themaddoctor/linux-mybook-tools/blob/mast...

I have no idea if this will work for you.

Backblaze didn't pioneer this, but they sure took it to a new level! [1]

1: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze_drive_farming/

You're not kidding. We recently bought a few dozen of them from bestbuy, ripped them apart for the disks, and put the disks in a NAS.

This is apparently common practise amongst data hoarders, especially after the flooding affected HDD production in Asia.

I considered that but gut instinct told me the cost had to be cut from somewhere and made me afraid of the failure rate.

You would think that but at least with the 8tb version they are often standard red drives that look the exact same as any other. It could be just that since they are their own drives, they can afford to price the hard drives much closer to their manufacturing costs.

I think it's standard price discrimination— internal drives are often bought alongside other expensive equipment as part of a "build" so that purchaser is a lot less price sensitive overall than someone who walks into Best Buy looking for a USB3 drive to use with Time Machine.

Or the drives could be refurbished, returned or otherwise unable to be sold as new. Based on the pricing, that always seemed like the most likely explanation.

The cost cutting comes from the warranty. You would have to send back the whole disk with the case as opposed to just RMA a disk.

Worth checking the model before doing so - I've had at least one drive where the USB connection was built into the drive itself (i.e. no SATA connection). I think it was a 2.5" drive, but I'd presume it's at least possible with a 3.5" drive.

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