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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.

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    It might be possible, but IMO the only company that would do that is Apple. Are you sure the drive is getting power? (You might be able to hear/fell it spinning up when the computer is switched on.) Have you tried putting the drive back on the SATA to USB adapter? Jun 30, 2018 at 11:05
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    Are you sure your Mac can take hard drives this big?
    – Daniel B
    Jun 30, 2018 at 11:13
  • Two ideas: 1) The SATA power connector can (should) provide 3.3, 5 and 12v power. But many modern drives no longer need the 12v. Does the Mac supply +12v (just in case that this particular drive does need it? 2) Some drives can be jumpered not to spin up until they receive a start command. Quite useful to prevent a large power surge at power on time of a PC with dozens of drives. And often seen in SCSI & SAS RAID cards. SO basically, what happens when you send this drive a 'start, spin up' command via mac equivalent of hdparms?
    – Hennes
    Jun 30, 2018 at 11:50
  • The reality is most any of these 2TB and higher drives cannot be formatted in an external enclosure and then placed internally. Different controllers for a whole slew of reasons, but the “Copy externally, hook up internally trick” doesn’t work when it comes to any drive larger than 2TB. If you take that same drive and just hook it up internally and then format it, you should be fine. Jul 3, 2018 at 17:01
  • And in addition, if you are attempting to use this drive in a Mac Pro (Tower) you need to make sure the internal SATA connection will recognize the full 8TB. Jul 3, 2018 at 17:04

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