I have several older WD enterprise drives that I wanted to erase and update the firmware. That’s how I found out about this problem. Not only is it impossible to erase a frozen drive, but it’s also impossible to check and update the firmware. I opened a support ticket with WD. Not surprisingly, they blamed it on the PC and Windows OS (i.e., everyone except WD).
I read somewhere that if a drive is mounted as removable, it won’t be frozen. My system board supports e-SATA, so I bought a powered e-SATA interface. This did not make any difference with Windows. Even suspending and resuming the computer with the drive connected using e-SATA no matter what I tried, the drive stayed frozen.
I had a spare SDD, so I installed ubuntu on it. Initially, I connected the drives using the regular SATA interface and they were frozen, but when I connected them using the e-SATA interface, they were not frozen.
I used hdparm to erase the drives. Here is a link: Advanced: Erasing SATA Drives by using the Linux hdparm Utility. If the drives are frozen, you may be able to unfreeze them by suspending and resuming the computer. As I said above, when I tried this on one of the drives, it worked. It seems consistent that if the drives are connected using e-SATA, they are not frozen. With the drives unfrozen, I was able to securely erase them. However, when rebooted the computer with Windows, the same drive that was unfrozen and erased was frozen again, even using the e-SATA interface.
I hope that helps.
