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?
Personally I think it’s a bad idea
There’s lots of things that can go wrong and most of the time those drives are made in super controlled environments because they can be extremely sensitive. It’s just not worth the headache
It’s completely fine and was one of the most common ways to add a cheap new drive back in places like /r/datahoarder. The WD enclosures are super easy to take apart with guitar picks and old credit cards. The USB controller just slots into the SATA port and is held in place with a single Philips screw. I’ve been running these in my server since as far back as 2018 (usually adding 1-2 every year or two) without a single issue.
A lot of external drives are just internal devices with another controller and casing around. I had a 4TB I used with my laptop, and tore apart the casing and just plugged it into my desktop when I built one. Unless you start hammering the external case around, the drive will be fine.
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I have opened other enclosures and found a custom board on the hard disk.
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.
Yup. And if you want to look up more info on how to do it correctly, look up hard drive shucking.
Thanks!
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
NOOO who would ever do that.
a lot of people it seems :>
It’s called shucking and it happens a lot especially in the home server home lab community.
learn something new every day :)
The best ones for this are the ones from Best Buy. Easystore.
It’s a bummer that hard drives are priced this way. It’s been common for a few decades now.
Don’t you think it’s wild that a hard drive, which is just chilling inside its case, suddenly has its innards spilled out using a screwdriver, and dumped into a 24/7 NAS with other hard disks.
A bit inhumane if you ask me.
It’s totally inhumane but also no living thing was harmed, so - all good.
Just that those ext disk aren’t built for 24/7 usage. They will die faster and generate bigger costs over time 😉
My oldest ones have been running 24/7 since 2018 and tons of people have been doing the same. Where’s your data to suggest that these drives fail faster than any other?
If you look around and are informed then you can easily purchase drives that are designed for Nas use. I shucked three eight terabyte Western digital external hard drives and they were all WD reds, but because of the deal they were running they were $60 a piece cheaper inside of the shell than they were outside of the shell.
Be aware. Some external USB drives, like WD Elements, have built-in USB controllers. So they don’t have a SATA connector.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
Indeed. That’s how I populated my NAS with 3 10TB drives and saved around 120 dollars total, and this was 4 years ago.
These are the ones I got: https://a.co/d/8x58jBY
The only extra thing was disabling the 3v pin, and that was it. Been running rock solid all this time.
Just make sure to research what disks are in the external housings you’re planning on getting, as not all drives need to have pins removed/covered.
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 #769 for this sub, first seen 28th May 2024, 15:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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.
Yeah! The practice is called drive shucking (kinda like Oysters) and you just need to be considerate of the limitations. The drives often end up cheaper, but lose warranty support once they’re shucked. They’ll also occasionally be slower than a normal drive or have an odd connector, but that is rare since it’s usually cheaper to go with something ‘off the shelf’. If you Google it though you should usually be able to find the handful of drive SKUs they’ll use in whatever external you’re planning to shuck.
oysters?
Edit: OP originally wrote “Osters.” No need to downvote.
Indubitably.
Ozone!
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.
