Question Re-use drives pulled from WD MyCloud?

[klandingham]

Hi,

I recently bought a WD MyCloud EX2 Ultra that was advertised as 8TB with the intent of setting it up as an 8TB RAID1 unit. Unfortunately, after receiving it I discovered that the "8TB" meant "8TB striped" (RAID0) and the 2 drives inside were only 4TB. So I replaced the two 4TB with 8TB drives, and successfully created an 8TB RAID1 array with those.

Now I would like to use the two 4TB drives as normal hard drives, but I can't get either of them to format. They will not format under Linux (error reading sector 0); I've also tried other disk utilties and they both always fail with various errors.

When I research the various errors I'm seeing, I see a lot of people stating the disks are bad and need to be replaced. But I'm not sure I believe that because:

1. No matter what tool/command I use, both drives give exactly the same errors. It's hard to believe they both failed in exactly the same way.
2. The drives are literally brand new...again, hard to believe they're both bad.
3. I ran gsmartcontrol on both drives with all available tests and they both had no errors.

I also ran "hdparm -I /dev/sdX" against both drives and they both show as "locked". I'm not sure what that means but I can't help but wonder if this might be the problem.

Appreciate any help, thanks.

 

[hotaru.hino]

It wouldn't surprise me if WD uses modified firmware in their external drives to prevent their use outside of the enclosure, as external drives can be as expensive if not cheaper than the cheapest bare drive of the same capacity on the open market.

 

[punkncat]

I tend to agree with the above. I have not seen any information that indicates it is so.

There has long been advice from tech circles to "shuck" external drives for the HDD inside as it was common to be the exact same model they were selling as "internal" for less money. Manufacturers probably caught on to this and are using methods to close the loophole, IMO.

 

[fzabkar]

What is the model number on the HDD label?

If you remove one of your new 8TB drives and attach it to a SATA port, is it also locked? If you examine sector 0 with DMDE, does it look encrypted?

https://dmde.com/

 

[BFG-9000]

7 years ago, there was a change to the SATA specification to allow enclosures to send a reset via the power connector over the usually unused 3.3v wires and back then, WDC announced that future SATA products would be compliant. However it wasn't until around 4-5 years ago that people started noticing WDC white label drives shucked from enclosures were, while the WDC Reds from back then were still not. By now they might all be.

If you are using an older PSU, then it would be worth trying a molex-to-SATA power adapter so the 3.3v wires are not connected and causing a continuous reset (or just cut the orange wires like a bomb-disposal technician).

If this is not the problem, then I would suggest using the old bootable WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostics utility to zero-fill the drives.

 

[fzabkar]

If you are using an older PSU, then it would be worth trying a molex-to-SATA power adapter so the 3.3v wires are not connected and causing a continuous reset (or just cut the orange wires like a bomb-disposal technician).

If this is not the problem, then I would suggest using the old bootable WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostics utility to zero-fill the drives.

AIUI, if the Power Disable pin is active, then the drive won't identify itself.

Also, if the drive is locked, then it won't allow reading or writing, including zero-filling or cryptographic erase.