Is it nowadays, with all the hardware encryption forcefully enabled by some external drives manufacturers (Looking at you WD) necessary or recommended to reformat the freed hard drive?
It will only be used on Linux, so the default exFAT is fine (Although i would be interested if there is some other file format you would recommend for my use case - which is just manual backups of videos and photos from time to time, no continuous runtime)
Main concern: Did WD do some shenanigans that would require a reformatting before using it via sata connection? Product in question is the WD MyBook
Also i would be interested if one can reinsert the drive into the shell after completely clearing it. Would it work again, or is there stuff on the HDD that is needed by the shells PCB and is lost by reformatting the drive? Just out of curiosity tho. Links to other sources also appreciated. Thanks :D