I bought the My Passport Studio external hard drive on eBay in 2024 to provide Time machine backup to my old mac mini. Specifically I wanted something that can be connected over Firewire, to save the USB ports on the mac mini. This worked well until one day the drive died - performed I/O really slowly and made classical clicking sounds of stuck/failed hard drive head.
The disassembly of the enclosure is easy, just a bunch of screws. It is a nice enclosure, all alluminium. Replacing the internal drive with Samsung EVO SATA SSD yielded nothing - the drive was not detected. I tried bunch of other drives, esp. classic 2.5" 5400 RPM drive (from Seagate), however none worked.
When a spinning-rust drive is connected to the board, it will start spinning, so there is definitely power being passed to it, however it does not get detected. This is what Linux says:
[11948.216367] usb 1-1: new high-speed USB device number 5 using ehci-pci
[11955.612358] usb 1-1: new high-speed USB device number 6 using ehci-pci
[11955.793202] usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=1058, idProduct=071d, bcdDevice=10.41
[11955.793209] usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=8, SerialNumber=3
[11955.793214] usb 1-1: Product: My Passport 071D
[11955.793218] usb 1-1: Manufacturer: Western Digital
[11955.793222] usb 1-1: SerialNumber: 3920202020202F75203E202044
[11955.857133] usb-storage 1-1:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[11955.857314] scsi host4: usb-storage 1-1:1.0
[11955.857603] usbcore: registered new interface driver usb-storage
[11955.879235] usbcore: registered new interface driver uas
[11956.869427] scsi 4:0:0:0: Enclosure WD SES Device 1041 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
[11956.887141] scsi 4:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 13
[11956.939093] scsi 4:0:0:0: Wrong diagnostic page; asked for 1 got 8
[11956.939098] scsi 4:0:0:0: Failed to get diagnostic page 0x1
[11956.939100] scsi 4:0:0:0: Failed to bind enclosure -19
[11956.939122] ses 4:0:0:0: Attached Enclosure device
[12072.344123] usb 1-1: USB disconnect, device number 6
[12122.004374] usb 1-1: new high-speed USB device number 7 using ehci-pci
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=307635 says "The few discussions I found about that message are about failing Passport drives" and another member responds with 'maybe it wasn't as important as I thought. It seems "SES" is needed "to enable features such as password protection, LED control, and access to the unit label". I don't used hardware encryption anyway, just noticed the LED keeps blinking even after disconnecting the drive but nothing else.'. I think people notice the error/warning message only after there is some problem with the drive, however the warning message seems to be there all the time.
So, the Wrong diagnostic page; asked for 1 got 8 message seems to be a red herring. On Linux kernel mailing list someone proposed a patch in 2023 to basically ignore such enclosures in the SCSI SES (SCSI Enclosure Services) driver however the patch has never been merged (as of 2026).
Anyhow, it seemed I was out of luck w.r.t. replacing the internal hard drive with a stock one. Tried bunch of other drives from WD which did not work, although these were pulled from older Sun microsystems/Oracle servers so likely running custom firmware.
After doing some research, I concluded the PCB holds full logic for the SATA-Firewire conversion and the original enclosure held a stock WD Blue Scorpio drive. Further, WD enclosures are notoriously known for refusing drives from other brands, so I bought an old/new (on-time being just couple of hours) WD Blue drive and it worked !
Using WD Blue WD10JPVX 1TB:
[258663.427097] usb 1-3: new high-speed USB device number 71 using xhci_hcd
[258667.815099] usb 1-3: new high-speed USB device number 72 using xhci_hcd
[258667.958938] usb 1-3: New USB device found, idVendor=1058, idProduct=071d, bcdDevice=10.41
[258667.958958] usb 1-3: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=8, SerialNumber=3
[258667.958965] usb 1-3: Product: My Passport 071D
[258667.958971] usb 1-3: Manufacturer: Western Digital
[258667.958976] usb 1-3: SerialNumber: 5758333145393438484D5939
[258667.965474] usb-storage 1-3:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[258667.965641] scsi host0: usb-storage 1-3:1.0
[258668.993650] scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access WD My Passport 071D 1041 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
[258669.000543] scsi 0:0:0:1: CD-ROM WD Virtual CD 071D 1041 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
[258669.043572] scsi 0:0:0:2: Enclosure WD SES Device 1041 PQ: 0 ANSI: 6
[258669.079485] sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0
[258669.095837] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 1953458176 512-byte logical blocks: (1.00 TB/931 GiB)
[258669.100815] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
[258669.100819] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 23 00 10 00
[258669.106343] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] No Caching mode page found
[258669.106347] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Assuming drive cache: write through
[258669.123769] sr 0:0:0:1: [sr0] scsi3-mmc drive: 51x/51x caddy
[258669.145094] cdrom: Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20
[258669.171068] sr 0:0:0:1: Attached scsi CD-ROM sr0
[258669.171170] sr 0:0:0:1: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 5
[258669.171336] scsi 0:0:0:2: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 13
[258669.256012] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI disk
[258669.276168] scsi 0:0:0:2: Wrong diagnostic page; asked for 1 got 8
[258669.276172] scsi 0:0:0:2: Failed to get diagnostic page 0x1
[258669.276174] scsi 0:0:0:2: Failed to bind enclosure -19
[258669.276191] ses 0:0:0:2: Attached Enclosure device
lsusb output line: Bus 001 Device 010: ID 1058:071d Western Digital Technologies, Inc. My Passport Studio (WDBALG)
The drive could be formatted as APFS and successfully used as Time machine drive.
The only trouble is that the internal CD-ROM like partition of the drive is reported by the system upon connecting the drive as 'The drive is not readable'. Selecting Ignore will make the message go away and the disk still works fine. In Disk Utility this partition is shown as 'WD Virtual CD 071D Media'. The VCD Manager app from WD crashes on my macOS.
Links:
- https://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/966527/How+to+replace+the+internal+drive#answer966528
- https://www.alldatasheet.com/datasheet-pdf/view/319668/PLX/OXUF943SE.html
- datasheet of the largest chip on the PCB, the OXUF943SE-LQAG which is USB/Firewire controller. It provides "bridging between FireWire800 or USB2.0 interface to a single SATA hard disk."
- https://www.storagereview.com/review/western-digital-my-passport-studio-review-1tb
- https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detailweb/a_id/14489/initiator/user
- https://macandegg.com/2017/04/diy-replace-hard-drive-my-book-studio-firewire-enclosure/
- https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/communications/article/21760486/firewire-chips-write-fast-consume-less-power
- contains description of the 2nd largest chip on the PCB, the LSI L-FW843-07. The article says: "The LSI FW843 1394B 800 Mb/s PHY connects to high-speed peripherals at the same transfer rate"
- https://www.newegg.com/model-wdbs8p0020bbk-nesn-2tb-external/p/N82E16822236336?source=f
- listing of the 2 TB version WD My Passport Studio 2TB 2.5" USB 2.0 / Firewire800 Portable Hard Drive Model WDBS8P0020BBK-NESN
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Passport
- https://www.newegg.com/western-digital-scorpio-blue-1tb-wd10tpvt/p/N82E16822136545
- listing of the Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD10TPVT 1TB 5200 RPM 8MB drive used in the original WD My Passport Studio
- https://superuser.com/questions/44318/how-do-i-remove-a-mybooks-wd-smartware-virtual-cd-from-my-desktop
- on how to remove the virtual CD partition
- the answer https://superuser.com/a/1763521 referencing https://sg.danny.cz/sg/sg3_utils.html looks promising
