I don’t know if I have recently heard of a good WD Elements drive not formatting directly out of the box. There were at least 5 different versions of the Elements drive. They are identified by S/N suffix “-01” through “-05”.
The “-03” was the most available version being sold when tablo first came out. It had a WD drive firmware issue that caused it to go offline. Since WD drives have multiple versions of the same models, it appears that WD doesn’t always indicate that a firmware update was available on the support page. You had to run the firmware update and see if an update was applied…