My Book 25EE SATA bridge works with no other HDD than 8TB model it came with!?

WD External Drives WD Portable Drives
1

I bought 6 pcs. ext. Harddisks My Book USB 3.0 8TB (Part No. WDBBGB0080HBK-NA). I’ve stripped the WD80EZAZ drives from the enclosures to use them internally in my FreeNAS.

The USB-SATA bridge in those enclosures now shows a very strange behavior: While it shows up in the system profiler under USB 3.0 as „My Book 25EE“, it doesn’t give access to ANY HDD except for those WD80EZAZ which it came with.

I’ve attached numerous drives, both 2.5" and 3.5", with all kinds of capacities and from a variety of manufacturers (including a Western Digital 5TB WD50EZRZ), but while they all spin up, non of them is accessible, no matter whether I try it with formatting tools on a Mac or PC.

Only the WD80EZAZ they came with is recognized… It’s a stupid USB-SATA bridge, so what the heck!?

Any ideas or suggestions? I mean is this a stunt by WD to prevent people from using the cases on other drives? Am I supposed to kick those 6 enclosures into the bin!?

2

OK. Solution found, although a nasty one: Disconnect pins 7+8 of the Winband 25x20 serial number flash memory on board position U2, as shown in this video (in the video it’s only pin 8, in the comments it’s 7+8, which worked for me).

Thank you very much, Western Digital. This non-sense cost me 3 hours yesterday, and another hour today.