Ages ago I had an external drive that had a controller with built in keys that encrypted the data in and out. Problem was that the controller was poorly made an

Ages ago I had an external drive that had a controller with built in keys that encrypted the data in and out. Problem was that the controller was poorly made and one time upon connecting to the PC, the controller chip died and so the keys with it. It was impossible to recover the data, but the disk itself was perfectly fine. I bought a damaged drive with working controller and swapped it out and my drive worked again, however I had to format it, because new board had different keys. Since then I preferred to use software encryption and steered clear of drives that use any sort of hardware encryption. The risk of losing data was not worth it.