Some, if not most, USB2 to SATA/SAS bridges also allows passing these commands. smartctl can talk with most of the bridges to pass-thru commands, at least for SMART purposes.
Seagate's 3.5" Backup Plus Hub drives mask the disk itself intentionally to show itself as a different, generic Seagate device, probably to prevent people from messing with the disk settings and identifying the disk itself.
And even if they support it, it isn't always safe to do so. For example, I have a WD Passport sitting on my desk that was bricked when I issued an ATA secure erase command[1]. Don't assume that any SATA/SCSI commands are safe to issue to USB drives unless you have researched it.
Probably the USB interface keeps some data for its encryption function on a part of the hard drive which it makes inaccessible. You erased the whole hard drive, including that part, and probably caused the USB interface to malfunction.
