Are these drives spinning up ? What I mean is that you can tell even if you
can't hear them by holding the drive in your hand. You should be able to feel
the gyroscopic forces produced by the mass of the platters. There is also a
peculiar noise that most drives make when un-parking the heads. It will not
un-park the heads until the platter(s) are up to the specified RPM.

The spindle motor driver is one of the most high current draining things in a
HD and is probably underbult. You might get off with replacing one chip, which
is more likely to work than swapping the entire board.

I extremely un-recommend Western Digital drives, if you get them working, clone
them to some real drives, like Seagates or even Maxtors (non OEM) I will never
buy another WD drive. I've lost too much.

JURB