Zero'ing it did nothing, in fact, I found that the drive only reads in small bursts. Or at least, I get that impression. A normal drive as you know, when you touch it while it's reading or writing you can really feel that stuff is going on inside. This faulty drive only seems to have head movement or what a layman would say "vibration" once every 2 secs for a small burst, like 0.2 secs or so.. No abnormal sounds coming from it what so ever.. So by this point, I know the drive is toast..

Anyway, as a curiosity: Does this clarify a little the situation, does it help determine exactly what went wrong with the drive? Would be interesting and perhaps have a small educational value if I found out what went wrong with it..

1) Zeroing out completed successfully?
2) How long did it take to zero out the entire drive?
3) Did you get some sort of confirmation message?
4) Did you confirm all 00s on the drive in some kind of free hex editor (HxD for example)?
5) You mentioned the drive currently reads in short bursts, what does the process of "reading" mean? How are you reading? With what utility? Also, what are you reading (did you dump new data on the drive and are reading that?)?

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Zero'ed it with Western Digitals DLDIAG tool.. I started zeroing the entire drive, but it would've taken 2 or 3 weeks, and I don't have time to wait that long so I did a "quick zero" which zero's the first million sectors and the last million sectors.. This required the drive to be initialized again in Windows and write a new MBR. Took about an hour just to do that, so imagine if I was gonna zero the 3,905 million sectors in between as well (approx 3,907 million sectors in total), this drive ain't worth all that time.. hehehe..

quick formatting it took an hour and writing stuff to it was extremely slow.. and by touching the case of the drive (it was connected without enclosure for this, not actually opened the drive itself), I could feel a quick vibration which I assume to be head movement once every two second, regardless of what operation it was doing.. No clicking or anything, but a slight vibration. When it sits and does nothing, there's no such vibration in it.

Used Windows Explorer to perform write and copying operations in order to read the transfer speed if I needed.. Did not go deeply in to it to check what was actually written to it..

Firmware problem - can't resolve without advanced tools.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Ok, thanks..

At least I know what went wrong with it.. Is there a reason for such firmware problems, or do they "just happen"?

Not in a position to explain much about it, but needless to say, it is not caused by the user. So, like you said, sort of "just happens".

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

I opened the drive just to have a look.. And I can see why everyone on the board says that you effectively kill a drive by opening it without a clean room and proper tools to prevent the heads from getting misaligned..

Anyway, i managed to get the heads fixed enough and aligned well enough to show up in windows. And what I was saying earlier "head movement every 2 secs" is the heads sitting near the center hub, travelling out to the edge of the platter and back in one quick move every two secs.. And it does this all the time while waiting for it to show up in Windows..

Drive is doing usual maintenace, but is unable to finish due to the firmware corruption. It could be refurbished by fixing firmware. Data is not important, I would try translator regeneration MHDD scripts, then zero fill...

Next time you open the drive, do it in bathroom. Poor a hot water, so steam will catch all dust particles. When steam settles on walls, open the drive. I didn't do this, just overheard. Cover your mouth and nose...