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?
Yup. And if you want to look up more info on how to do it correctly, look up hard drive shucking.
Thanks!
It’s called shucking and it happens a lot especially in the home server home lab community.
learn something new every day :)
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 😉
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.
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?
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.
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
Same happened to me on a WD black
Amazing, I didn’t know they did this
Which external drive did you buy? This must be a fairly recent change.
Just why don’t they omit the casing inside the case too?
Yes. Be aware there will be some pin blocking you need to do to make it work right because vendors know this trick.
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
Yeah typical :P
Yes. It’s a viable way to save money if you use a site like https://shucks.top/
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!
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.
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)
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.
NOOO who would ever do that.
a lot of people it seems :>
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
