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?

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.

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?

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

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