You're getting replies about shucking, but WD Passports are 2.5 inch drives that AFAICT are USB-only. The drive controller speaks USB directly, as opposed to SATA chained to a translator chip on a separate board. I've got a pair on my desk which I won't attempt to open, as I'm actually using them as portable external drives (as opposed to my pile of easystore carcasses).
I haven't noticed any abnormal behavior, but I also don't mount/luksOpen them with -o discard (if that's what it takes to trigger this).
You can see it visually too if you have a 2.5-inch drive to compare it to (or know the size of a 2.5-inch drive): drives with separate USB to SATA boards are longer to fit that board, while these are only about the same length as the bare drive plus the plastic shell.
Wonder if the physical hdd part itself is identical to the SATA models, and swapping over the control board from a (eg dead) SATA one of same capacity (& platters) would work?
Unlikely, in a modern (high capacity) drive, the firmware contains quite a bit of calibration data for all the components. You'd probably have to perform a factory reset and reformat of the physical disk blocks.
I haven't noticed any abnormal behavior, but I also don't mount/luksOpen them with -o discard (if that's what it takes to trigger this).