I might have made a $150 mistake. I saw a WD MyBook 8TB External Drive for $150, and thought that it was quite a bargain and wanted to use it as an internal drive on my 2010 Mac Pro tower.
Before cracking it open, I partitioned/formatted to a Mac OS format. Now, when put inside a Mac, it’s not seen at all. The usual “Can’t recognize drive” message doesn’t appear, nor can I access it via disk utility.
I wrote to Western Digital, and got a canned reply. My question was whether the WD80EZAZ drive was built in a way that it would not function without the PC board that converts from SATA to USB? I am looking for confirmation that this type of sabotage is possible, and if there is any work-around.
FWIW, I saw this other question “Converting an external hard drive to internal” but in that case, the drive functioned fine, and I’ve done this before with other drives, which is why this caught me by surprise.