Hard Disk has no partition map, cannot be unmounted or erased

Question

I have a 2Tb 2.5" hard disk that was formatted for a PC (but had errors), and have now connected it to my Mac. It is connected externally via a USB to SATA cable - I have tried two different USB to SATA cables that both work with other drives.

I first tried to erase the disk in Disk Utility (HFS+, GUID Partition Map), and got an error, saying could not write to last block. Since then the disk will now no longer show in Disk Utility, but will show in Terminal, like this:

    /dev/disk1 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                                                   *2.0 TB     disk11

Nothing else. No Partition Scheme.

Trying this:

diskutil eraseDisk ExFAT DiskName /dev/disk1

Or this:

diskutil eraseDisk HFS+ DiskName /dev/disk1

Gives:

Started erase on disk1
Unmounting disk
[  \   \   \   \   \   \   \   \   \   \   \   \   \   \  ] 

Error: -69888: Couldn't unmount disk

So then:

sudo diskutil unmountDisk force /dev/disk1

Gets:

Forced unmount of disk1 failed: at least one volume could not be unmounted

But then despite that error, the disk has been unmounted - it does not appear in diskutil list. But then repeating:

diskutil eraseDisk HFS+ DiskName /dev/disk1

Gives:

Could not find disk for /dev/disk1

There is a post with a roughly similar issue here.

This command:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk1 bs=4096 count=8

Gives:

8+0 records in
8+0 records out
32768 bytes transferred in 0.000559 secs (58609362 bytes/sec)

Nothing happens for about 2 minutes, then the Terminal prompt reappears. diskutil list then does not show /dev/disk1

Unplugging the USB cable and reattaching it then starts the whole process as before!

Any assistance would be most welcome! I can't find an exactly equivalent case on the forum here, hence posing the new question here now.