A WD 4TB drive that wont format to one volume?

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sambat2000

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Feb 14, 2011
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I recently purchased a WD 4TB My Book as it was the cheapest option to buy a 4TB green drive. When plugged in on USB the drive shows as a 4TB Volume, outside of the enclosure it shows split into 2 volumes.
I have reformatted the drive to GPT but still shows 2 volumes. In Disk Management/Win 10 I do not get any options to merge the volumes, and in EaseUS when you try to merge volumes the other volume is not shown as an option to merge to.
The drive is a WD40EZRX.
Any ideas please?
 
Solution
SuperSoph_WD
Hey there, @sambat2000!

Unfortunately, taking the HDD out of the WD My Book enclosure has voided the warranty on it. If you really want to use the WD40EZRX only as an internal secondary storage drive, you might want to consider formatting it using the WRITE ZERO feature in the Data LifeGuard Diagnostics for Windows. Hopefully, you will be able to partition & format it properly from Disk Management afterwards.
However, I'm still not sure if that would work. The WD My Book drives are hardware encrypted and usually need the original USB-SATA bridge in the enclosure to work properly. Moreover, the bigger external HDDs (above 2 TB) are configured with 4 KB LBAs. When taken out of the case and plugged via SATA, they...
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SuperSoph_WD

SuperSoph_WD

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Jul 30, 2014
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Hey there, @sambat2000!

Unfortunately, taking the HDD out of the WD My Book enclosure has voided the warranty on it. If you really want to use the WD40EZRX only as an internal secondary storage drive, you might want to consider formatting it using the WRITE ZERO feature in the Data LifeGuard Diagnostics for Windows. Hopefully, you will be able to partition & format it properly from Disk Management afterwards.
However, I'm still not sure if that would work. The WD My Book drives are hardware encrypted and usually need the original USB-SATA bridge in the enclosure to work properly. Moreover, the bigger external HDDs (above 2 TB) are configured with 4 KB LBAs. When taken out of the case and plugged via SATA, they are exposed to the native 512e LBAs. This means that even if the HDD did not incorporate a hardware-based encryption, you will still need an enclosure that is configured with the same 4KB sector size for the HDD to appear & work properly.

Hope this was helpful. Keep me posted with the troubleshooting.
SuperSoph_WD
 
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