solved: hard drive dead dead or just dead?

Batman: Hmm I need to read up on this thanks. I have idea what that means.
Thanks will look into it. But I won't touch it until Amazon finally sends me my hard drive. Which will be a while. Every time it fails to deliver I have to wait a month for a refund.

Here's the short version: WD external drives are generally filled with surplus WD "white label" enterprise drives. Some WD enterprise drives, unlike their retail drives (Blue/Red/Black etc) follow a part of the SATA spec in which the 3.3v rail is used to send a "drive reset" signal. Enterprise systems use this ability to physically power cycle the drives from afar. The problem is that consumer PSUs generally don't apply this part of the SATA spec and the majority of them supply a constant current on the 3.3v rail. When you use one of these enterprise drives with one of these PSUs, the 3.3v current means the drive is constantly receiving a "reboot" signal which causes it to never actually boot up. Here's an article confirming that a 10TB WD Easystore being sold in 2019 contained a WD100EMAZ white label drive affected by the 3.3v issue.

Some PSUs have dropped the 3.3v rail as it's no longer used in modern systems, which means you can use these drives without a problem. If your PSU supplies 3.3v to its SATA connectors, you need to physically prevent the 3.3v rail from reaching the drive in order for it to work. There are quite a few different methods to do it. You can apply a thin piece of kapton tape to the relevant pin on the SATA connector (safe and permanent fix across all systems, but fiddly). You can pry the pin off the drive with a knife (don't do this). You can use a molex -> SATA adaptor (molex doesn't carry 3.3V). You can use a SATA -> SATA splitter and physically pull out the wire that carries the 3.3V rail (this is my suggestion for a long-term solution as molex -> SATA adaptors have a spotty reliability record). You can remove the wire from your modular power supply SATA cables (essentially the same thing but a bit riskier/more permanent).

If your 10TB drive is one of the affected ones, your old system's PSU didn't deliver 3.3v, and your new system's PSU does, it would completely explain what you're seeing.

Only way to know for sure is to try it, but there's one easy check you can do - have a look at the SATA power connectors on the old system and compare to the new system. If the old system has four wires and the new system has five wires, this is your problem. You can also try googling the model number on your 10TB drive label + "3.3v" and see if there are any hits.

Batman

gbwelly

Batman

allio