Beware: some Western Digital MyBook Essential disk enclosures do some encryption in hardware (in the USB bridge, it seems). It doesn’t appear to be configurable, and renders the disk data inaccessible when used in any other way.

I’m not sure what the advantage is, but this creates a lot of useless fiddling when you crack it open to use the disk somewhere else. Also, no hope of using the remaining enclosure as an emergency drive for other disks.

Now, I need to borrow another equally big hard disk to be able to transfer my data out of the encrypted disk in the enclosure, and back into the same disk mounted in my NAS.

Thank you WD, that was really useful…