use of the WD "my book" 4tb drive

[Petter Adsen]

On Fri, 02 Oct 2015 11:02:48 -0700
"John R. Sowden" <jsowden at americansentry.net> wrote:

> I am looking at using the above drive, but a few questions came up. WD 
> tech support is very vague on these issues.
> 
> I want to partition the drive to more than 1 partition.  I say more than 
> 1 because WD says they support partitioning, but after a few more 
> questions, that only applies to 1 partition!  So, has anyone partitioned 
> one of these drives to different file systems, like ext4, fat32, a mac 
> partition (not sure of the name) or the win file system (not sure of its 
> name either)?
>
> They also say that they have not tested their mybook series of hd for 
> linux!  So they say they do not support the use of linux on their hd.  
> Any experience with ubuntu and the mybook series hd?

What they mean by that is just that they won't answer Linux support
questions - their support staff aren't trained to do that.

> Another Q.  What about the "hardware encryption"?  does hardware mean os 
> agnostic?  has anyone used the hardware encryption with, say, ubuntu?  
> Does anyone know which encryption algorithm they use?

Take a look at this:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1284828

From reading that, it seems you must disable the encryption to use the
drive with Linux. Everything I could find is several years old, so
there might be another form of encryption in more recent drives,
though. Another option mentioned in the above thread is using a Windows
VM to unlock the drive and then mount it in Linux, but that seems like
a major hassle.

It seems you also cannot remove the drive from the enclosure and
connect it to an internal SATA port in case the electronics or
connector in the enclosure fails. I'd consider that a big drawback, you
might not.

Petter

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