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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?

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/

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.

Mountain_Mike_420 ,

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.

bjoern_tantau ,
@bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de avatar

I like the trash to hook up any hard drive via USB.

JustARegularNerd ,

Yeah one of these is literally my primary USB 3.0 to SATA adapter

Petter1 ,

But you don’t need 8 of them, do you?

bjoern_tantau ,
@bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de avatar

You never know.

Stop staring at my cable box. I don't have a problem!

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.

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.

entropicdrift ,
@entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

IMO, if you want the beast deals right now on a 12+ TB HDD, you should use serverpartdeals.com instead. I've got 2 manufacturer recertified 14 TB enterprise-grade drives from them and it was way cheaper than buying any 14 TB external drive.

Sunny OP ,
@Sunny@slrpnk.net avatar

Im based in scandinavia so wont be able to buy from there, but thanks anyway!

rmuk ,

Hey. Heyhey. Heyheyhey. Have you ever noticed that your warships have giant barcodes on them? It's so that when they return to port they can scan the navy in.

qaz ,

There are also refurbished drives available on Amazon

Moonrise2473 ,

Yes and i got "scammed" - western digital in order to save $3 included the USB port directly on the drive motherboard instead of the usual sata+usb like anyone else was doing

ArbiterXero ,

Amazing, I didn’t know they did this

BeatTakeshi ,
@BeatTakeshi@lemmy.world avatar

Same happened to me on a WD black

MonkderDritte ,

Just why don't they omit the casing inside the case too?

ShepherdPie ,

Which external drive did you buy? This must be a fairly recent change.

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.

slazer2au ,

Yes. Be aware there will be some pin blocking you need to do to make it work right because vendors know this trick.

Sunny OP ,
@Sunny@slrpnk.net avatar

Yeah typical :P

stevestevesteve ,

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

jose1324 ,

I had to do it with brand new psu and cables. Seasonic . So no

ShepherdPie ,

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.

stevestevesteve ,

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.

jose1324 ,

Well. They do

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