I was in hope also that WD drives would have some Seagate-like straight-forward interface for echoing into a serial console software (HyperTerminal, Windmill, TeraTer, etc.) the post progress of the drive when power up, but as Jared advicea, the commands are proprietary.
If you have experience and equipment to solder/desolder SMD devices, the most convenient procedure should be to desolder de 8-pin EEPROM, soldering it to an adapter PCB just for connecting to an EEPROM reader/programmer and read/modify/write the data. I do such procedure for having an entire backup file of the EEPROM chip. However, I do not recommend to connect some kind of "pod" or "attach" reader/programmer (the kind of ICSP, In-Circuit Serial Programmer) to read or write the contents of the EEPROM, since you will be intefering with the read/write access of the Marvell chip processor.