WD - My Passport 5TB External USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive with Hardware Encryption (Latest Model) - Black

Anyone know if hardware encrypted drives are less or more prone to failures versus a regular drive? Or is it the same as a regular drive?

Not sure about failure rates, but think about what happens in the event of a failure. Recovery of encrypted data is going to be difficult at best and maybe impossible. I have a WD My Book that has failed, and those encrypt data. It appears I'm going to have to acquire a controller board of the same model and rev level (hopefully these are available from people who bought these models to shuck the drives) and then remove a surface mount chip from the bad board and install it on the new board to carry over the matching encryption key. While I'm trying to do that, I'm back down to only one copy of only some of that data on my laptop, and no currently-accessible copies of some files because I didn't realize until too late that I had also had a failure of my Seagate Central NAS drive's NIC. I'm not certain, but I don't think the Seagate Central encrypts (by default anyway); I have higher hopes of recovering that one by pulling the drive and popping it into a toaster or enclosure. Any drive I buy going forward will not encrypt data unless I plan to use it specifically for data that is highly sensitive. Cherished family photos and videos will not be encrypted. Of course, I will also be looking for a good off-site backup option so fire, flood, or theft doesn't take out my laptop and the backup drive. Whether you do or don't go with encryption, be sure to keep multiple backups and check them often so you can replace one quickly if it fails.

This is $99.99 now on Amazon.

Quote from bobjohnson : This is $99.99 now on Amazon.

Thanks! PM'd by BestBuy and picking it up today.