5 mo. ago • 94%

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?

82 comments

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

79
- Thanks!
  
  5
It's called shucking and it happens a lot especially in the home server home lab community.

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- learn something new every day :)
  
  5
  
  It’s a bummer that hard drives are priced this way. It’s been common for a few decades now.
  
  9
  
  The best ones for this are the ones from Best Buy. Easystore.
  
  4
- 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.
  
  2
  
  It's totally inhumane but also no living thing was harmed, so - all good.
  
  2
- Just that those ext disk aren’t built for 24/7 usage. They will die faster and generate bigger costs over time 😉
  
  -1
  
  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.
  
  3
  
  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?
  
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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.

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- I like the trash to hook up any hard drive via USB.
  
  9
  
  Yeah one of these is literally my primary USB 3.0 to SATA adapter
  
  5
  
  But you don’t need 8 of them, do you?
  
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Be aware. Some external USB drives, like WD Elements, have built-in USB controllers. So they don't have a SATA connector.

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- 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?
  
  11
  
  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.
  
  9
  
  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.
  
  1
- 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.
  
  6
- Good to know! thanks
  
  4
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

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- Same happened to me on a WD black
  
  4
- Amazing, I didn’t know they did this
  
  2
- Which external drive did you buy? This must be a fairly recent change.
  
  1
- Just why don't they omit the casing inside the case too?
  
  1
Yes. Be aware there will be some pin blocking you need to do to make it work right because vendors know this trick.

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- 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
  
  13
  
  I had to do it with brand new psu and cables. Seasonic . So no
  
  2
- Yeah typical :P
  
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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.

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- Im based in scandinavia so wont be able to buy from there, but thanks anyway!
  
  8
  
  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.
  
  6
  
  There are also refurbished drives available on Amazon
  
  1
Yes. It’s a viable way to save money if you use a site like https://shucks.top/

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

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Why create yourself a headache and still get substandard and no-warranty drive. If you want cheaper drives go for reconditioned/refurbished/used drives. Same risks, better product. Old enterprise SAS drives are cheap and many still have plenty of heath in them.

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- Do keep in mind that you need a SAS controller for that, which can cost between $50-200
  
  3
- And maybe some juicy data to recover 😏 honestly, which enterprise sells its old drives? That is calling for a data leak, isn’t it?
  
  1
  
  Many sells, some just wipe them, some just contains encrypted data. If you happy with just used drive eBay is full of surprises.
  
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  The ones that aren't forced to care by regulators. So basically anyone that isn't finance or defense.
  
  2
- Do you have places where you can buy those old business drives? Are there websites for this market?
  
  1
  
  https://serverpartdeals.com/
  
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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.

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- oysters?
  
  Edit: OP originally wrote "Osters." No need to downvote.
  
  2
  
  Indubitably.
  
  2
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.

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I thought you were talking about the platter

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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.

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- 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)
  
  2
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.

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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.

4
- 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?
  
  5
NOOO who would ever do that.

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- a lot of people it seems :>
  
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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.

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- Well.. out with it then!
  
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  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.
  
  1

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]

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.

3
- 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.
  
  3
  
  Pretty sure my Seagate usb disks I use for backup are SMR and sustained writes are awfully slow. Luckily I've discovered restic for backing up which lowered a 1.5tb weekly incremental backup from 9hrs to 1 min.
  
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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.

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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.

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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.

2
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.

2
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.

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

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

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I think I'd buy 2nd hand quality server drivers before I'd shuck.

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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.

1
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

-1
- 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.
  
  5
- 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.
  
  3
I did once. Well, more along the lines of "what did i buy this thing for, can use the HDD as is". The HDD had additional contact points at the bottom. Don't remember if they worked as is and what i did with them.

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