Hiya, so am looking to buy more storage and while browsing am seeing some external harddisks, such as Western Digital My Book and Seagate Expansion Desktop for cheaper than the internal harddisks themselves. Have seen this one video from KTZ Systems where he bought up multiple of these external ones just to open them up and use the disks for his own server. Was therefore wondering if you peeps have ever done this and if there any downsides to it at all?
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This is what I did when I had to refurb a laptop. Swap the drives, reinstall the OS, snd hand it all to the user. All your files are on this usb drive.
Thats when you find out who understands folder structure and who doesn’t.
I guess it shows how out of touch (old) I am that it’s completely bewildering to me that there could be people who do not understand folders … on a computer. Phones, tablets, yeah, I get that, those actively make it harder and harder to access the folder structure. But computers?
i bought a big external hdd recently on impulse… a clearance sale. it was really, really cheap. with the thinking that i could ‘shuck’ it because i’m short on space in a couple storage systems. i checked. i can, but i haven’t. hell, i haven’t even used it yet other than to run a full smart diag on it, followed by a full format and a read/write verify. took days. then i put it back in the box and have basically forgotten about it until now.
you have to be careful on what models you buy. some have usb built onto the controller board (no internal sata) or other things (e.g. encryption chip, weird power) that make it more difficult or even impossible to use the internal drive in an environment other than the enclosure it ships in.
Yes. Be aware there will be some pin blocking you need to do to make it work right because vendors know this trick.
Yeah typical :P
I have done this with dozens of drives and have never had to do any pin blocking. You only need to do that if you’re using an absolutely ancient sata power cable that doesn’t know about the spinup pin change
I had to do it with brand new psu and cables. Seasonic . So no
Same here. A brand new modular Seasonic Platinum PSU (back in 2018 when I built the PC) also needed the 3v3 pin covered. I just use Kapton tape over the pin to avoid any destructive methods or having to use sketchy molex connectors.
This has been the case since SATA revision 3.3, released Feb 2016. So while I may have exaggerated with “ancient”, a brand new PSU certainly shouldn’t still be feeding 3.3v to that pin.
Well. They do
I have opened other enclosures and found a custom board on the hard disk.
Shucked drives are usually the drives that are rejected for internal use because of quality issues. They might work fine, they might not. Be careful with them and remember, RAID is not a backup.
maybe if you buy them from aliexpress, but WD/Seagate USB drives have better warranty than internal drives and at the same time they need to withstand more abuse from users (of course that warranty is void the moment you shuck them)
for some people is normal to keep an hdd in the backpack and carry it around all the time (for me is unconceivable)
Yup. /r/Datahoarder guided me right. Got two of the recommended model of MyBook and shucked them. This was 2-3 years ago. Disks are still going strong in my NAS.
I thought you were talking about the platter
Yes I’ve done it. What sucks is you make a lot of trash this way. Also double and triple check that the drives you buy will have standard sata connectors on them.
I like the trash to hook up any hard drive via USB.
But you don’t need 8 of them, do you?
You never know.
Stop staring at my cable box. I don’t have a problem!
Yeah one of these is literally my primary USB 3.0 to SATA adapter
Be aware. Some external USB drives, like WD Elements, have built-in USB controllers. So they don’t have a SATA connector.
I think this depends on whether it’s a 3.5 or 2.5 inch drive inside. To my knowledge, all external drives with a 3.5 inch drive inside are shuckable and have a standard SATA interface. With the compact drives that have a 2.5 inch drive inside, many will have a native usb interface and no SATA connector.
It makes sense as 3.5" sata drives are used for many many applications so why make something new just for external drives? With 2.5, however there are very few devices that use spinning sata drives in this form factor. It makes a lot more sense to build the USB interface directly on the drive since their main and possibly only application is external drives.
I could be wrong, but this has been my experience.
Good to know! thanks
This must’ve changed as I’ve shucked WD Elements / Book drives and they were normal drives…
So, you’re saying the actual harddrive has a USB chipset onboard and only a USB interface?
When did this start happening?
the 2.5" size of disks are now mostly direct USB controller disks rather than sata adapters internally.
3.5" disks are still SATA as far as i’ve seen but the actual sku’s of the disks are often the lower grades. like you will get a disk that looks like another good disk but with only 64mb of dram instead of 256 on the one you would buy as a bare internal drive for example so they can end up a bit slower. and warranties are usually void.
I’ve shucked probably 100s of those WD essentials and they just had a little SATA -> USB adapter on it. It’s been a few years but it doesn’t seem like they’d make a whole new PCB just to include USB.
Within the past 2-3 years drive manufacturers have been swapping to USB PCBs directly attached to the drive controller, instead of using a SATA -> USB interface.
Ok, so does that also mean we can check the SMART parameters now?
Previously, the USB interface effectively blocked access to them.
Used to be my main source of disks, but these days there are better ways and it is easier to know exactly what you are getting.
Well… out with it then!
Not the person you replied to, but my first 9 HDDs were all shucked from external WD enclosures (MyBook, Elements, EasyStore), but the last one I bought used from serverpartdeals.com. I think it was about $120 for a 14TB WD server drive. Thus far all is well with it after about a year.
many times, shucking is a very valid way to get large format disks for cheaper than retail NAS parts. But be aware of what your buying and make sure that the disk your getting if its a white label is a reliable disk. WD Easystore/Mybook are generally good, as are the larger format Seagate external.
Yup, with 2,5" Seagates. Reused the enclosure with smaller used enterprise ssds to make cheap USB sticks.
I think I’d buy 2nd hand quality server drivers before I’d shuck.
NOOO who would ever do that.
a lot of people it seems :>
after doing it for a few drives and observing the failure rates of said drives i just buy drives with warranties now. i’ve got a few shucked drives still kicking around though.
