I have a WD Green HDD that I wanted to securely erase using diskutil on Mac. For context, I have connected it to my Mac using a Seagate GoFlex USB 3 Desk Adapter that I happened to have lying around. This seemed to work with the drive appearing as expected in Disk Utility GUI, and in smartctl -a outputs (i.e. showing the name as WD Green, relevant model number, and providing SMART outputs).
For context, initially it showed as the following from diskutil list:
/dev/disk2 (external, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: FDisk_partition_scheme *3.0 TB disk2
1: 0xEE 3.0 TB disk2s1
And from smartctl (with a similar device name appearing in Disk Utility GUI):
~ % smartctl -a /dev/disk2
smartctl 7.5 2025-04-30 r5714 [Darwin 20.6.0 x86_64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-25, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family: Western Digital Green
Device Model: WDC WD30EZRX-00D8PB0
I then started a secure erase as below (yes, I can be patient). However I got an error 69759 due to stupidly bumping the drive:
~ % diskutil secureErase 2 /dev/disk2
Started erase on disk2
Pass: 1
Error: -69759: Securely erasing data to prevent recovery failed
Underlying error: 6
After that point, it started showing in diskutil list like so:
/dev/disk2 (external, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: *3.0 TB disk2
In hindsight, maybe I shouldn’t have, but the next thing I did was retry the previous secure erase command (which completed successfully). Afterwards, it still showed as having a blank type in diskutil list as above.
Next, this is where it gets weird… In the Disk Util GUI, it showed as “Seagate WD30EZRX” (the latter being the correct WD model number. I rebooted the Mac, after which point the Disk Util GUI showed the drive name as “Seagate GoFlex.” Under Info, it also showed SMART Status as “Not supported” and smartctl gave similar output.
I’ve since tried a quick re-format; to both exFAT and APFS formats, but in both cases it still showed as not supporting SMART status.
Can anyone tell me what I need to do to get SMART working again, given I know this HDD supports it? E.g. do I need to format it on a Windows machine (inconvenient but achievable)?
Update: In the ten minutes since posting, it is now (in APFS format) giving output through smartctl! Yet, it is still showing as SMART Status “Not Supported” in the Disk Utility GUI.
Given I can get the info from command line, I’m happy to leave the drive as-is, but I’m still curious why I’m getting a different answer in the GUI. Maybe given more time, its behaviour will continue to change again.
