No, this is (usually) not necessary.

created this account just to prevent people from buying external hard drives from this brand. bought 2 different ones from wd elements. both no longer work, lost all my data on them. after i enter the password for my hard drive, an error message comes up and i have to enter the password again. after the 2nd try, the hard drive disappears. tried to find it with the hard drive utility, but it shows as ''not activated''. can't repair it either. an error message appears. no longer have access to all the content.