WD External Drives Prompting Format

[msgbrd_mnstr]

my questions are 1:
I have a WD Elements 5tb (ext. hdd), opened the enclosure and inserted hdd in my 8 bay hdd enclosure. win10 cant access it (hdd manager sees it/hdd works in WD enclosure/hdd not damaged). if I format and put it back in WD enclosure it cant be read from WD enclosure. Is this due to the controller on WD enclosure? Can this be fixed (to be able to swap back and forth without formatting each time?)

question 2: Is this also an issue with WD My Cloud EX2? That once you put a hdd in and format through WD then it wont be read in a different enclosure, and unable to easily swap hdd.

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Welcome to the TH community, msgbrd_mnstr!

Yes, this is due to the configuration of the HDD and the enclosure. Massive externals (above 2 TB) are configured with 4KB LBAs, once the HDD is out of the enclosure you expose it to the native SATA 512e LBAs. You'd need an enclosure that is configured with the same sector size as the WD Elements one, if you try to access it from elsewhere. You should also know that, unfortunately, taking your WD Elements HDD out of the enclosure voided the warranty on the external drive. 🙁

As for your WD My Cloud EX2 question, can you please provide more details about it? Do you have RAID 1 or RAID 0 configured with the HDDs inside? Usually, network attached storage systems use a different file system than the regular desktop/portable external drives or internal SATA HDDs. This is probably the reason you are unable to swap the HDDs from your WD My Cloud EX2 to a different enclosure and access them from there.

Hope I was able to answer your questions. Keep me posted if you have more!
SuperSoph_WD