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Have you ever bough an external hardrive only to take the disk out of it?

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?

lazylion_ca ,

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.

Phoonzang ,

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?

SeaJ ,

Not specifically, no. When I did change to building my own NAS, I cracked open my older 4TB backup drive to use as a spare.

possiblylinux127 ,
@possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip avatar

I thought you were talking about the platter

Cobrachicken ,

Yup, with 2,5" Seagates. Reused the enclosure with smaller used enterprise ssds to make cheap USB sticks.

hperrin ,

I haven’t bought them specifically for that, but I have harvested drives from them. A lot of times, you’ll have to destroy the enclosure to get to the drive. If you’re ok with that, go for it.

astrsk ,

Yes. It’s a viable way to save money if you use a site like https://shucks.top/

klangcola , (edited )

You might want to look up SMR vs CMR, and why it matters for NASes. The gist is that cheaper drives are SMR, which work fine mostly, but can time out during certain operations, like a ZFS rebuild after a drive failure.

Sorry don't remember the details, just the conclusion that's it's safer to stay away from SMR for any kind of software RAID

EDIT: also, there was the SMR scandal a few years ago where WD quietly changed their bigger volume WD Red ("NAS") drives to SMR without mentioning it anywhere in the speccs. Obviously a lot of people were not happy to find that their "NAS" branded hard drives were made with a technology that was not suitable for NAS workload. From memory i think it was discovered when someone investigated why their ZFS rebuild kept failing on their new drive.

ares35 ,
@ares35@kbin.social avatar

i bought a few smr drives, knowing they were smr. they were cheaper, a lot cheaper than the same amount of space in cmr. used only for static media storage, so that's not a big deal, really., but holy hell was it slow getting stuff on them initially.

i have a few self-powered externals that are also smr (quite common with those as they use 2.5in notebook hdd). when those things have to start shuffling bits around and rewriting tracks, sustained write speeds fall well under what even usb2 can send.

ares35 ,
@ares35@kbin.social avatar

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.

Gormadt ,
@Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I've shucked a few drives in the past but when there was a big sale on hard drives awhile back I finished decking my NAS out with 8TB drives that weren't shucked as they came out to be cheaper than the ones in enclosures at the time.

The main downside is warranty really and some of the drives from enclosures need to have the power blocked on one of the pins to work (can't remember which sorry) due to the type of drive they are.

Decronym Bot , (edited )

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
NAS Network-Attached Storage
PSU Power Supply Unit
RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage
SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage
ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity

5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 17 acronyms.

[Thread for this sub, first seen 28th May 2024, 15:55]
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bunny_funeral ,
@bunny_funeral@lemmy.world avatar

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.

mindlight ,

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.

infinitevalence ,
@infinitevalence@discuss.online avatar

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.

MstrDialUp ,

Yup. And if you want to look up more info on how to do it correctly, look up hard drive shucking.

Sunny OP ,
@Sunny@slrpnk.net avatar

Thanks!

SpikesOtherDog ,

I have opened other enclosures and found a custom board on the hard disk.

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