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How To: Remove WD Hard Drive from MyBook Enclosure About Me
Posted on October 25, 2015 by lui_gough Publications and Appearances
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Well, seeing as I purchased four of the 6Tb MyBook drives, you didn’t think I would just Legacy Site
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Well, of course not. The main reason I went with the external enclosure versions was Interesting Links

because I could get them delivered for about AU$5 less per drive than buying the bare
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drive with a 2-year warranty. In the external enclosure configuration, they have better Audio
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once I’ve extracted the drives inside, I would have some enclosures with bridge chips that
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The WD MyBook enclosure for the 6Tb units I have is made with a screwless design. It
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doesn’t have any obvious clips which can be depressed through the vent-holes as with 2200mAh Promotional Power
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the gap in the casing near the curves, I managed to exert enough force on one corner to U1173A Compatibility with
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Similar to a Toshiba drive I took apart earlier, the bridge board itself is very small, and photography powerbank
occupies a corner of the drive. power bank project radio
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To take the assembly apart, you should ease the drive out of the frame by pushing it up, review-challenge rf rtl2832 salvage

and then pulling it horizontally away from the rear. Then, you can pull out the light-pipe site update storage tablet

from the underside mounting hole, and undo the bridge-board securing screw with a teardown tested
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The light pipe structure seems quite interesting, as there appears to be a push-through-fit WordPress.org

rubberized “chamber” which connects the light-pipe to the LED.

The other side has the SATA connector with a sheet of insulating plastic to stop any
potential shorting of the PCB against the rear of the drive. This board is dated Week 20 of
2015.

The grommets themselves slide off the studs which are screwed into the four corner
mounting holes of the drive. The screws are done up with a decent amount of torque, so a
quality Torx T10 screwdriver is recommended to undo them.

After this, you will have your desired drive, ready for internal usage inside a computer or
storage unit, although due to the sector size difference, re-partitioning and reformatting will
be necessary.

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I'm a bit of a nut for electronics, computing, photography, radio, satellite and
other technical hobbies. Click for more about me!
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Hard Drive →

46 Responses to How To: Remove WD Hard Drive from MyBook

Enclosure

matson says:
November 26, 2015 at 3:48 am

Will you please share two numbers about this device? I would like to add it to
usb.ids.

You blacked-out model number from your photo. I expect you have a WDBFJK-
type. Will you please confirm, or otherwise, tell me what are first bunch of letters of
model number?

What is this model USB ID?

Optional extra: what is ASM1051W ID? I did not see that one before. I expect, if
the ROM is removed, or its legs cut, then bridge chip will use its own (mask rom)
id.

https://usb-ids.gowdy.us/read/UD/1058
https://usb-ids.gowdy.us/read/UD/174c
Reply

lui_gough says:
November 26, 2015 at 9:11 am
P/N: WDBFJK0060HBK-04
Default WD My Book 1230 VID 0158 PID 1230 REV 1065

I cut the Vcc lead (pin 8) from the EEPROM, and the device detects as
USB Mass Storage Device VID 04D9 PID 2013 REV 0103 and disables
the goofy 4k sector translation mode as well, so regularly written 512e
drives >2Tb actually read correctly.

Hope this is useful.

– Gough
Reply

SourDo says:
February 13, 2016 at 7:18 pm

Would you kindly identify in your photo which “pin 8” lead it was
that you cut that “disables the goofy 4k sector translation mode”?
Thank you. I’m an electronics newbie.
Reply

lui_gough says:
February 14, 2016 at 7:05 am

One of the most basic requirements of doing anything in

electronics is identifying pin numbers. They follow a
convention – dot identifies pin 1 (or notched side where
pin 1 will be on the bottom row), and pin numbers are read
anti-clockwise. In the case of pin 8 on an 8-legged chip,
it’s the top pin on the notched side.

See basic diagram at the end of this page:

http://cdselectronics.com/components/chip/ic.htm

– Gough
Reply

SourDo says:
February 16, 2016 at 4:59 pm

Thanks again, Gough. It worked perfectly just as

you described. The WD MyBook “enclosure” no
longer identifies itself in Windows as “MyBook
1230”, but instead as “AS2105”. And it now works
with a 2TB harddisk I put into it, whereas it did not
identify the harddisk before.

lui_gough says:
February 16, 2016 at 6:16 pm

Glad to hear it worked, and best of luck for your

future electronic endeavours.

– Gough

liev says:
March 13, 2016 at 4:54 am
Awesome solution. You really help us. You are the best.
Reply

Sebastian says:
October 3, 2016 at 6:33 pm

Thank you very much for the this useful info about the MyBook
series. I have a few MyBooks in use where I have desoldered the
EEPROM. There is one major problem with this “solution”: no
powermanagement anymore. The drive spins permanently, no
matter if it is connected to a computer or not or if the computer is
shut down. I dumped the contents of the EEPROM but there is
nothing useful in the resulting file. Commen reverse engineering
with binwalk etc. also no helpful. There are many tools and
firmwares out there for the AMS1051 but NONE of them works
with the 1051W. I wonder what is the difference.Any info about the
firmwares and their structure is welcome!
Reply

lui_gough says:
October 3, 2016 at 6:49 pm

Thanks for your observation. Unfortunately, I don’t have

any more information – I suspect only WD would know the
difference between the W version (presumably special for
them). That being said, the lack of power management is a
drawback for some, but a feature in my eyes. I don’t like
drives spinning down at idle and then spinning up when
accessed as it can cause extra wear and tear, and I don’t
really want to wait while it spins up. Other machines (e.g.
Macs) can sometimes have the drive drop out if it doesn’t
“wake up” in time as well. It’s not good for heat or energy
consumption, especially for less often used drives – I
normally resort to physically unplugging drives after
backups in that case.

Considering that I really wanted the drives anyway, having

any way to reuse the case is considered a bonus for me :).

– Gough
Reply

Sebastian says:
October 4, 2016 at 10:10 am

As you said, for backup purpose and then

physically unplugging them it is suitable. But if you
leave it connected permanently to your PC, NAS
or TV the drive will be constantly active. A bad
ventilated plastic enclosure like the MyBooks is not
a good thing either. From six MyBooks I bought in
the past two years I can summarize: All of them
came with the ASM1051W bridge. They recognize
no other drive than the original one, even if it is the
same brand and capacity. Maybe in former
(firmware-) versions of the MyBook that was
possible – but that is history. So in order to use it
you have to disable / desolder the EEPROM. You
will get rid of the 4k sector emulation but loose any
 kind of powermanagement. It is not possible to
spin down the drive anymore even manually. Also
you won’t be able to use hdparm on the drive in
the enclosure since it fails to turn on dma (-d1) and
32bit I/O (-d1). smartctl still works over this bridge.
The H/W ID will become 174c:51d6. The PCB has
two 4pin headers that are not populated and look
a serial console but no output on them, they are
related to that unpopulated area on the PCB. The
structure of the firmware is mostly unknown. A
dump from a desoldered EEPROM showed no
familiar header, layout or any strings that might be
helpful. ASMedia did not respond to my Email
about datasheet and firmware.So be aware of the
drawbacks if you plan to re-use those
enclosures….

Schnuffsche says:
October 4, 2016 at 4:50 pm

Sebastian, thanks a lot for all this work. For me, the power
management is important, thus your observations confirm
that disassembled WD My Books are just to be recycled.
Unless of course a future firmware update would fix it.
Reply

matson says:
November 26, 2015 at 10:29 am

That is useful. Thank you for going the extra distance and physically damaging
your possession for a stranger’s request!

In my experience of cutting the power pin, GL (Genesys Logic) and JMicron

bridges will reveal inner identity, but one NEC PATA bridge became 0000:0000.
Linux handled it fine, but Windows could only use it in some host ports. (I do not
remember whether silent rejection, or error notified to user, or treated as useless
“unknown device”, or what.) I doubt software sanity, I wonder if software (including
xHCI firmware and O.S. driver) is wrongly returning 04D9:2013 instead of true ID.
Does 04D9:2013 match your keyboard?

Considering that xHCI is much more capable, complicated, silicon than EHCI, and
considering that wrinkles are being ironed-out of host controller drivers still today; I
suspect ASMedia chip might have become 0000:0000, and identity 04D9:2013 is
taken from a keyboard.

https://usb-ids.gowdy.us/read/UD/04D9/2013

If you are willing to give me another chunk of your time, then will you please again
check the USB ID of that bridgeboard with cut memory? This time, use some other
system software or hardware.

Example different software setup: a Mac, Linux liveCD, Android slab, whatever
else will tell you USB PID.

Different hardware cold mean same PC and same Windows, but a different host
controller, and no other 04D9:2013 present (assuming IF you have such a
keyboard).
Reply
lui_gough says:
November 26, 2015 at 11:09 am

I swore I had saw that VID/PID and yes, that does belong to my keyboard.
Power cycling it again on the same hardware gives me VID 174C PID
51D6 REV 0001 which is ASMedia as expected. Must be a Windows goof
along the way due to an older NEC Renesas chipset driver possibly being
silly.

I tried it with my Samsung ARM Chromebook running Ubuntu and I can

confirm this later result is the correct one as per lsusb. Should’ve double-
checked before I posted!

– Gough
Reply

matson says:
November 26, 2015 at 12:40 pm

One more sanity check: is that 51d6 51D6, letter dee as in disc?
Or did you maybe mis-read your screen, is it actually 5106? I feel
a bit of doubt regarding five-one-dee-six, considering ASM1051 is
five-one-zero-six, so ASM1051W might use same ID.
Reply

lui_gough says:
November 26, 2015 at 12:51 pm

Raw output from lsusb so there is no doubt whatsoever:

Bus 002 Device 002: ID 174c:51d6 ASMedia Technology
Inc.
Device Descriptor:
bLength 18
bDescriptorType 1
bcdUSB 3.00
bDeviceClass 0 (Defined at Interface level)
bDeviceSubClass 0
bDeviceProtocol 0
bMaxPacketSize0 9
idVendor 0x174c ASMedia Technology Inc.
idProduct 0x51d6
bcdDevice 0.01
iManufacturer 2 ASMedia
iProduct 3 AS2105
iSerial 1 00000000000000000000
bNumConfigurations 1
Configuration Descriptor:
bLength 9
bDescriptorType 2
wTotalLength 44
bNumInterfaces 1
bConfigurationValue 1
iConfiguration 0
bmAttributes 0xc0
Self Powered
MaxPower 0mA
Interface Descriptor:
bLength 9
bDescriptorType 4
bInterfaceNumber 0
bAlternateSetting 0
bNumEndpoints 2
bInterfaceClass 8 Mass Storage
bInterfaceSubClass 6 SCSI
bInterfaceProtocol 80 Bulk-Only
iInterface 0
Endpoint Descriptor:
bLength 7
bDescriptorType 5
bEndpointAddress 0x81 EP 1 IN
bmAttributes 2
Transfer Type Bulk
Synch Type None
Usage Type Data
wMaxPacketSize 0x0400 1x 1024 bytes
bInterval 0
bMaxBurst 15
Endpoint Descriptor:
bLength 7
bDescriptorType 5
bEndpointAddress 0x02 EP 2 OUT
bmAttributes 2
Transfer Type Bulk
Synch Type None
Usage Type Data
wMaxPacketSize 0x0400 1x 1024 bytes
bInterval 0
bMaxBurst 15
Binary Object Store Descriptor:
bLength 5
bDescriptorType 15
wTotalLength 22
bNumDeviceCaps 2
USB 2.0 Extension Device Capability:
bLength 7
bDescriptorType 16
bDevCapabilityType 2
bmAttributes 0x00000002
Link Power Management (LPM) Supported
SuperSpeed USB Device Capability:
bLength 10
bDescriptorType 16
bDevCapabilityType 3
bmAttributes 0x00
wSpeedsSupported 0x000e
Device can operate at Full Speed (12Mbps)
Device can operate at High Speed (480Mbps)
Device can operate at SuperSpeed (5Gbps)
bFunctionalitySupport 1
Lowest fully-functional device speed is Full Speed
(12Mbps)
bU1DevExitLat 10 micro seconds
bU2DevExitLat 2047 micro seconds
Device Status: 0x0001
Self Powered
Reply

matson says:
 November 26, 2015 at 1:25 pm

A new id. Thank you for tolerating me. You are the
best!

Jens says:
April 3, 2016 at 9:02 pm

Hi, which chip is the eeprom chip where I have to cut pin 8? Winbond, APM4532
or RT8284?
Reply

lui_gough says:
April 3, 2016 at 9:19 pm

The EEPROM is the Winbond chip in my board.

– Gough
Reply

Tom Christensen says:

April 25, 2016 at 4:37 am

Hello,

I’ve got a 8TB My Book, from which I removed the original drive.
Unfortunately, I seem to be unable to use the bridge-board with
other hard drives such as a 4TB WD Green. for example, WD
Drive reports the ‘other’ drive as “My Book 0 bytes”, I get a WD
SES code 52 error and as such I am unable to format/initialize the
drive when connected to the bridge-board.

Is the due to the 4k sector translation mode? Does the My Book

bridge-board recognise other drives if you cut pin 8 on the
Winbond EEPROM?
Reply

Jens says:
April 4, 2016 at 12:03 am

Perfect… thank you!

Reply

highflyingtv says:
April 7, 2016 at 12:14 am

You didn’t mention the disk is encrypted.

Reply

lui_gough says:
April 7, 2016 at 12:57 am

It isn’t. Only Passport drives are encrypted. You will find the data is
inaccessible due to 4k native sector addressing due to bridge chip
translation as documented in 2013:
http://goughlui.com/2013/10/02/experiment-usb-to-sata-bridge-chips-and-
 2tb-drives/

– Gough
Reply

Tom says:
May 21, 2016 at 1:53 am

I’m having trouble opening the enclosure. (Of course, I could just break the thing
open with no regard for the plastic exterior, but I’m not *that* frustrated yet — I’m
still trying to keep cosmetic damage to a minimum so I can potentially reuse the
enclosure.)

Inserting a standard plastic spudger (intended for cell phone repair) into the gap
does not exert enough force. But even with a flathead screwdriver it seems like I’m
only damaging the shell, but not forcing it to slide apart …
Reply

Tom says:
May 21, 2016 at 2:04 am

Update: Yay, I got it! I had loosened the corners, but it was still stuck,
seemingly in the middle of the backside (where the ports are). I ran the
spudger along the seams there for a while and eventually it just “popped”
open – I think the clip right next to the USB 3 port had still been holding
out.

Thanks for the post, saved me a lot of trouble!

Reply

SanicFast says:
June 23, 2016 at 2:32 am

How thick is the drive? Is it over 9.5mm?

Reply

lui_gough says:
June 23, 2016 at 8:27 am

The drive is a standard 3.5″ drive, not a 2.5″ drive, so it has the standard
thickness of ~20mm.

– Gough
Reply

Schnuffsche says:
September 6, 2016 at 10:35 pm

So, if I remove the hard drive can I easily use the USB bridge chip with other WD
hard drives, even if they have a different capacity than the original one? Say, I
want to the the WD My Book 4TB chip with a 2 TB WD20EARS.

Is it correct that I have to use ‘Advanced Format’ drives?

Thanks and kind regards

– Schnuffsche
Reply

lui_gough says:
September 7, 2016 at 12:09 am

In practice, I’ve tried and been successful in using newer bridges with both
AF and regular 512 byte drives. It seems the bridges will present a 4k
native sector size over USB for drives >2Tb, and 512byte sector size for
smaller drives. As a result, there can be “interchange” issues (i.e. >2Tb
drive formatted on the bridge and connected to a computer SATA port or a
bridge that doesn’t do 4k translation won’t read properly).

I can’t guarantee that it will work for all drives though – I’ve had an
occasional drive that refuses to play well with particular bridge boards
probably due to a timing issue (e.g. using an SSD from particular vendors,
one WD 160Gb Blue drive but other 160Gb Blue drives are okay).

– Gough
Reply

Schnuffsche says:
September 7, 2016 at 12:16 am

Dear Gough

thank you very much indeed. I tried it with one WD2500AAKX

which did spin up but could not be formatted. Also, in the WD drive
management software (for Mac) the bridge would continue to
report as 4TB My Book. Its the newest bridge btw.

I guess I will need to try different drives to see which work.

Again, thanks a lot.

– Schnuffsche
Reply

lui_gough says:
September 7, 2016 at 12:29 am

They may have changed something – but I never use the

software that’s supplied. The ID may be incorrect because
the firmware for the bridge is specified to “overwrite” the
drive’s ID with the model number of the MyBook, however,
that is purely cosmetic in my experience.

If you’d like to disable all the WD nonsense (i.e.

overwriting IDs, WD SES device), you can revert the
firmware to the mask ROM failsafe firmware by snipping
Pin 8 that supplies power to the serial EEPROM that holds
the firmware – that’s if you are “giving up” on the bridge
and willing to damage it (intentionally) to try and make it a
little more flexible. It will (after the mod), or should, report
all drives as their 512-byte sector native and make
interchanging with internal ports just fine.

That being said, I’ve not bought any newer drives, so I

can’t guarantee that the newer bridges work the same –
my assumption would be that if it uses the same Asmedia
 chipset, any differences are purely firmware based.

– Gough
Reply

Schnuffsche says:
September 27, 2016 at 5:59 pm

Gough, thanks for the reply. May I ails you what

tool you recommend to snip Pin 8? Kind regards,

– Schnuffsche

lui_gough says:
September 27, 2016 at 6:36 pm

A quality pair of flush-cut sidecutters is my

favourite tool for that kind of work. If unavailable, a
good pair of nail clippers might be sufficient. If you
have no intention of ever re-connecting the pin
with a dab of solder, you could just use a small
jewellers thin flat-bladed screwdriver to snap it off.

– Gough

matson says:
September 30, 2016 at 12:02 am

Because I did not have such fine-small side-

cutters, I used a utility knife. Very risky to damage
something else, if it slips.

Justin says:
September 17, 2016 at 1:31 am

Hello,
Just wanted to say thank you for this guide! I cut the leg of the winbond chip and
the enclosure finally works with my old HDD.
Reply

Ricky says:
September 27, 2016 at 12:26 am

Hello,

Not sure if this is relevant but maybe you will be able to help me.
I currently have the older model of this HDD (WDBWLG0030HBKNE) and it has
stopped working. After some trouble shooting and internet searches i have found
the issue to be a faulty Bridge chip. however this model does not seem to be
available in stores anymore, do you think it would be possible to use a bridge chip
from this newer unit? If not is there another way to bypass this card to extract the
data another way?

if possible please share your thoughts.

Thank you for your time

Reply
 lui_gough says:
September 27, 2016 at 10:40 am

Unfortunately, since the depreciation of Windows XP, some newer drives

are beginning to ship with bridge boards without the 4k sector translation
goofery that was happening with drives of this generation. If you plug the
drive directly into a PC and it comes up corrupted or incorrectly
partitioned, then it’s a good chance you’ll need a bridge board with 4k
translation. Whether present models of drive still have this feature, I
cannot advise. http://goughlui.com/2013/10/02/experiment-usb-to-sata-
bridge-chips-and-2tb-drives/

– Gough
Reply

thomas says:
April 5, 2017 at 7:27 am

There is a way to set up a decryption filter in linux. I did that for my 4TB
My Book so that I could use it inside my desktop computer. Contact me if
you want me to help.
Reply

Rick says:
November 10, 2016 at 10:33 am

Excuse my ignorance but if i was to buy a my book 6tb unshell it then fit it in my pc
or a different jbod enclosure, would i have any compatibility issues? i will obviously
no longer use that asmedia controller.
Reply

lui_gough says:
November 10, 2016 at 3:24 pm

I can’t give you any guarantees of course, but the drives used in the
enclosures are usually Green series (or now, renamed Blue series) drives.
These are not intended for JBOD/RAID or multi-drive usage anyway.
Whether they have tinkered with the firmware, I’m not sure. In my
experience, they will work in single drive internal port usages just fine,
multi-drive will probably cause issues at the first sign of data loss as the
drives would not have TLER (time-limited error recovery) features resulting
in it dropping out of and breaking RAID/JBOD sets. There are also
potential “freak” compatibility issues between an individual drive that
doesn’t recur with another drive of exactly the same model sometimes as
well (as I’ve occurred with some Seagate 4Tb drives).

Doing this also voids the warranty and voids any support from the
manufacturer – so remember, you do this at your own risk.

Data interchange (i.e. being able to read the stored data on the drive
when taken out of the case) will depend on whether the drive has an older
“XP Compatible” 4k “native” sector translation by the bridge chip or not.
Later drives are increasingly avoiding the use of this translation thus
making the drives “interchangeable” without a reformat. Otherwise,
repartitioning and reformatting will be necessary.

– Gough
Reply
Enrique Garcia says:
November 21, 2016 at 1:33 am

How can I reuse the case with other disk??

I had removed the 3Tb HD from its case and I want reuse the USB 3.0 case with
other disk but when I put other disk in this case, the computer don`t recognize it
Reply

Mario T. says:
November 30, 2016 at 12:20 pm

Hi Gough,
Thaks for this useful articles. It made me realise that it’s probably better to get
reds for my NAS than pursue conversion of these greens into reds.

Btw, what do you think about this article and the whole conversion idea? The
method described on the link below cannot give them TLER, right?
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/hacking-wd-greens-and-reds-with-
wdidle3-exe.18171/
Reply

lui_gough says:
November 30, 2016 at 12:40 pm

Dear Mario,

WDIDLE is a utility that can set the drive head parking time – this doesn’t
affect the error recovery behaviour of the drive, however, such tweaks
may be necessary depending on the I/O pattern of your application
regardless of drive type as by default, after a certain amount of idle time,
the drive heads are unloaded onto the ramp. The default values for
different vendors/models of drives can be different.

In former early Greens, there was talk that TLER can be re-enabled using
a tool called WDTLER. Unfortunately, as far as I know, these tools no
longer work on current drives as the whole thing is now baked into
firmware.

– Gough
Reply

Mario T. says:
November 30, 2016 at 12:46 pm

Much obliged, red it will be then

Reply

JanSik says:
March 12, 2017 at 2:13 pm

I purchased few days ago the 8TByte WD MyBook willing to use its USB 3.0
interface also with other SATA disks. I followed the instructions of this website and
after having cut the pin 8 on the Winbond chip, the board ( https://goo.gl/YPfpfa )
continued to not recognize other disks. Than I looked at the scheme of the the
chip and found that it looks similar to this one (https://goo.gl/2vtAe3 ). Measured
 the voltage on the just cut pin 8 of the chip and found that there are still 3.17 Volt.
Probably it came from pin 7 as it was still connected to Vcc. Than I cut also the pin
7 and everything started to work correctly and the board was usable with plenty of
other discs. I can not understand why WD does not wand that their board can be
reused with other WD disks? However I noticed that after cutting of the 2 pins the
chip becomes very hot with temperature rising to about 70 degrees Celsius.
Reply

L T says:
April 30, 2017 at 2:50 pm

I also got the 8TB version today from Best Buy and as JanSik mentions, cutting
pin 8 is not enough, pin 7 also must be cut so that the USB board is detected as
‘ASMT 2215 USB Device’
Reply

Denny MANSART says:

September 3, 2017 at 11:45 pm

I bough some time ago 3 WD My Book with 4 Tb and I did not know what to do
with the boxes as was not working with older disks.

I follow some of your advice by cutting the PIN 8 of the Winbond chipset. Did not
work. Then cut the PIN 7 and it did the trick. I can now use the box for an old 500
Gb!

Thx for the trick!

Reply

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