Shucking an external drive - pro's and con's

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I've just learned about this idea. So what are the pro's and con's of doing this? Are the shucked drives high quality? Does this really save money over buying a raw external HDD?
 
Yes it saves money if you jump on the deals.

May have to jigger with the power supply - some have locked SATA supplies. Easy to work around though

Possible lack of warranty.
 
The hard drives are USUALLY slower. Like 5400rpm. Designed as a backup device or just something you can store files you use less often.

I go to thrift stores and take the drives out of older PVR's. Way better business to be made. Some of the drives in their are 2TB.

As far as buying an external enclosure and pulling the drive, you won't save much and the drive will be slow
 
Brian_B said:
Yes it saves money if you jump on the deals.

May have to jigger with the power supply - some have locked SATA supplies. Easy to work around though

Possible lack of warranty.
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If you pull the drive from an enclosure (WD My cloud for instance), it will void the warranty. Speaking from experience.

For the the speed of these drives you are better off looking for deals on internal drives. Especially with the cost of SSD's being low.
 
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auntjemima said:
The hard drives are USUALLY slower. Like 5400rpm. Designed as a backup device or just something you can store files you use less often.

I go to thrift stores and take the drives out of older PVR's. Way better business to be made. Some of the drives in their are 2TB.

As far as buying an external enclosure and pulling the drive, you won't save much and the drive will be slow
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$236.65 8TB 5400 RPM internal
$139.99 8TB 5400 RPM external

For all intents and purposes, those are the same drive. You're paying $100 more for an extra year of warranty.

auntjemima said:
If you pull the drive from an enclosure (WD My cloud for instance), it will void the warranty. Speaking from experience.

For the the speed of these drives you are better off looking for deals on internal drives. Especially with the cost of SSD's being low.
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Shucking a drive does not void the warranty unless you damage the case (in the US anyway).
 
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Something I posted some time ago..... One thing to keep in mind. You know how CPU manufacturers "bin" devices that come off the assembly line.. All processors of a particular model start out the same. Because of many causes... Contamination, fate whatever some will pass at full speed. Some will pass at reduced speed. Some full speeds will be fused to only work at a slower speed.. All depends on yield percentages and marketing realities. The same thing has been done with hard drives... Some drives that passed at a lower throughput (but may have failed at a standard throughput) for example may be dumped into USB2 external enclosures, where the higher speed isn't a necessity. They may use a less powerful (or just cheaper) internal controller, or just find that 1000 drives only pass at 80MB/s as opposed to 160MB/s. It may be the same drive that many others have received, it may not be. YMMV, but you can save money. Remember, if the drive you ripped out of an external enclosure fails or does not perform to the level you would expect from a internal drive, you have effectively voided your warranty and will have no recourse.
 
mwroobel said:
Remember, if the drive you ripped out of an external enclosure fails or does not perform to the level you would expect from a internal drive, you have effectively voided your warranty and will have no recourse.
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This is absolutely incorrect. It may come down to how much you want to fight a company that's pulling this crap, but "void if removed/opened" types of warranty limitations are illegal.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/...-stickers-sony-microsoft-nintendo-ftc-letters
 
Self warranty, never trust a single drive for data anyways. Spinning rust is all shit, don't believe their marketing, go check with people who deal with rooms full of them.

When you are building a big storage server for yourself its literally cheaper to have multiple spares on hand then to buy the "normal" drives and wait for a molasses RMA process during which yet another drive might fail.

You can spend half an hour using a dozen plastic picks and shuck the WDs without leaving scratches, obvious marks or broken clips. But after a couple you get tired of that shit and rip them open in 30 seconds. Besides, you only need to keep 1 or 2 undamaged cases to save for returns :)
 
I shucked 8x 8tb wd easystores back in 2017 for my second array, they were still red labels back then. 5400rpm doesn't matter in this case, I get sustained 350MB/sec+ moving data to or from them on my controller. Even that kind of speed only comes in handy when transferring things over the 10gbit fiber between the server and my pc's nvme drive. Price is king here, I agree it's cheaper to just get one or two more of these drives to keep on hand than pay more for an additional year of warranty that most likely won't come into play anyway. I have one extra 8tb I bought back then (made three orders of 3x drives each.)
 
All of my WD easystore shucks were done non-destructively using a cut up credit card and patience, I still have all 13 of the enclosures/pieces in a box in my garage, they don't have any tamper stickers that I saw when shucking it.
So if *knock on wood* one fails I can easily reinstall it in the enclosure and send it off for warranty which is about to expire on all of them as they reach 2 years (running the white label drives in raid 6 w/ hot spare currently with no issues).
 
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ryan_975 said:
This is absolutely incorrect. It may come down to how much you want to fight a company that's pulling this crap, but "void if removed/opened" types of warranty limitations are illegal.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/...-stickers-sony-microsoft-nintendo-ftc-letters
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I’ve had it go both ways. I shipped in a few defective drives out of the several dozen I have shucked. One was refused, no discussion, no appeal. Just no. It depends on who at the other end is the one doing the RMA and what kind of mood they are in.
 
5 of my 7 HDDs in use are shucked. Never had an issue, for the amount of storage I need, I don't see any reason to ever buy a non-external. The prices scale horribly for bare hard drives these days.
 
Just shucked one this morning and in the process of immediately writing 7TB to it. (Moving over an entire hard drive from an 8TB to the 10TB)
Clipboard01.jpg
 
rive22 said:
I threw away all of the cases except for 4, sitting in box in storage. It doesn't really matter what case they go back in if I ever need to send any in.
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FYI, the case has a serial number which matches the drive serial number.
 
TheSlySyl said:
Just shucked one this morning and in the process of immediately writing 7TB to it. (Moving over an entire hard drive from an 8TB to the 10TB)
View attachment 176488
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update: 10 hours later and its still maintained an average of around 150 MB/S write speed. Of course, the read speed is what matters to me, but i'm impressed thus far. I know some of the older drives I have couldn't maintain that write or read speed. Also no errors that any of my HDD monitoring systems have caught.

It's been hitting around 50C all day, but its crazy hot here and there hasn't been any issues, so once its done doing (literally) 12 hours of sustained writing, i suspect temps won't be much of an issue.
 
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Aluminum said:
Self warranty, never trust a single drive for data anyways. Spinning rust is all shit, don't believe their marketing, go check with people who deal with rooms full of them.

When you are building a big storage server for yourself its literally cheaper to have multiple spares on hand then to buy the "normal" drives and wait for a molasses RMA process during which yet another drive might fail.

You can spend half an hour using a dozen plastic picks and shuck the WDs without leaving scratches, obvious marks or broken clips. But after a couple you get tired of that shit and rip them open in 30 seconds. Besides, you only need to keep 1 or 2 undamaged cases to save for returns :)
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Plus send a failed HDD back for an RMA that has masses of data on the platters still. Who knows what they do with them. I bet many are not encrypted. As you say not worth the bother unless you maybe bought the large top line enterprise models.
 
daglesj said:
Plus send a failed HDD back for an RMA that has masses of data on the platters still. Who knows what they do with them. I bet many are not encrypted. As you say not worth the bother unless you maybe bought the large top line enterprise models.
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This is why I'm looking forward to stable encryption support in ZFS...
 
arnemetis said:
I shucked 8x 8tb wd easystores back in 2017 for my second array, they were still red labels back then. 5400rpm doesn't matter in this case, I get sustained 350MB/sec+ moving data to or from them on my controller. Even that kind of speed only comes in handy when transferring things over the 10gbit fiber between the server and my pc's nvme drive. Price is king here, I agree it's cheaper to just get one or two more of these drives to keep on hand than pay more for an additional year of warranty that most likely won't come into play anyway. I have one extra 8tb I bought back then (made three orders of 3x drives each.)
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8 or 10 TB for a 6 GB bare drive price. I like that. If I shucked a WD drive today, would it still be red or some other color?

Since I have like zero experience with WD drives, what is a good or best drive for backup? Up to now, I've been using HGST Deskstars, which spin at 7200, but I'm sure I could live with 5400.
 
grifter_66 said:
WD - Easystore 10TB External USB 3.0 Hard Drive - Black - $160 at Bestbuy right now
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-eas...-3-0-hard-drive-black/6278208.p?skuId=6278208

Have any of you guys used this drive? I want to pick one up if it's shuckable.
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I don't use BB that much. Much prefer Newegg. So how can I set up an altert with BB that doesn't get me bombarded every single day with offers about stuff I don't care about? Or, is there a regular schedule for BB to put these drives on sale?
 
x509 said:
8 or 10 TB for a 6 GB bare drive price. I like that. If I shucked a WD drive today, would it still be red or some other color?

Since I have like zero experience with WD drives, what is a good or best drive for backup? Up to now, I've been using HGST Deskstars, which spin at 7200, but I'm sure I could live with 5400.
Click to expand...
The days of getting an actual red label inside are long gone, you're pretty much guaranteed to get a white label. The 5400rpm vs 7200rpm makes no appreciable difference for most use cases. If you have data that you think needs to be fast, it should be on an ssd anyway. I like HGST too, they're what my first array is. For a backup these would be a great buy.
 
The 5400rpm vs 7200rpm makes no appreciable difference for most use cases
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At work I demand 7200 RPM drives in my raid servers. At home I want 5400 and no raid at all + 2 hour inactivity sleep to keep the drives powered down as much as possible. I do us SnapRAID dual parity for that at home. At work we are mostly raidz3 or raidz2 backed up to LTO7 tape and / or offsite backup however the connection is currently only 100 MB/s (company policy) so it takes months to transfer TBs of data.

Edit:

OOPS. I mean 100 megabit connection (which is more like 75 megabits per second) not MB.

Thus is an upload to a 196 TB server.
Code: 
receiving incremental file list
sn_data_006/bacula/DS5_Changer_6_0000
 53,687,078,871 100%    7.59MB/s    1:52:28 (xfr#1, to-chk=37/41)
sn_data_006/bacula/DS5_Changer_6_0001
 53,687,079,079 100%    7.95MB/s    1:47:23 (xfr#2, to-chk=36/41)
sn_data_006/bacula/DS5_Changer_6_0002
 53,687,079,305 100%    8.00MB/s    1:46:42 (xfr#3, to-chk=35/41)
sn_data_006/bacula/DS5_Changer_6_0003
 53,687,078,406 100%    8.10MB/s    1:45:22 (xfr#4, to-chk=34/41)
sn_data_006/bacula/DS5_Changer_6_0004
 53,687,077,997 100%    8.07MB/s    1:45:43 (xfr#5, to-chk=33/41)
sn_data_006/bacula/DS5_Changer_6_0005
 53,687,078,176 100%    7.49MB/s    1:53:58 (xfr#6, to-chk=32/41)
sn_data_006/bacula/DS5_Changer_6_0006
 53,687,078,198 100%    7.82MB/s    1:49:08 (xfr#7, to-chk=31/41)
sn_data_006/bacula/DS5_Changer_6_0007
 53,687,078,322 100%    7.51MB/s    1:53:35 (xfr#8, to-chk=30/41)
sn_data_006/bacula/DS5_Changer_6_0008
 53,687,078,444 100%    7.96MB/s    1:47:15 (xfr#9, to-chk=29/41)
sn_data_006/bacula/DS5_Changer_6_0009
 53,687,078,176 100%    7.87MB/s    1:48:25 (xfr#10, to-chk=28/41)
sn_data_006/bacula/DS5_Changer_6_0010
 53,687,078,322 100%    7.48MB/s    1:54:01 (xfr#11, to-chk=27/41)
sn_data_006/bacula/DS5_Changer_6_0011
 53,687,077,238 100%    7.36MB/s    1:55:54 (xfr#12, to-chk=26/41)
sn_data_006/bacula/DS5_Changer_6_0012
 53,687,078,585 100%    7.49MB/s    1:53:54 (xfr#13, to-chk=25/41)
sn_data_006/bacula/DS5_Changer_6_0013
 53,687,079,134 100%    7.78MB/s    1:49:41 (xfr#14, to-chk=24/41)
sn_data_006/bacula/DS5_Changer_6_0014
  2,867,298,304   5%    6.46MB/s    2:07:56

I have transfered ~27TB of backup data so far (but that has taken months at these speeds.).

Code: 
[IRL@aion radimg]$ df -h .
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdd        196T   27T  160T  15% /aionraid
 
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As for shucking, I leave the drive in its external enclosure until at least the warranty has expired. It works fine in my home setup as an external.
 
drescherjm said:
At work I demand 7200 RPM drives in my raid servers. At home I want 5400 and no raid at all + 2 hour inactivity sleep to keep the drives powered down as much as possible. I do us SnapRAID dual parity for that at home. At work we are mostly raidz3 or raidz2 backed up to LTO7 tape and / or offsite backup however the connection is currently only 100 MB/s (company policy) so it takes months to transfer TBs of data.
Click to expand...
Could you expand a bit on what it is you do with that work server? With you company policy of a gigabit connection, that doesn't make too much sense since it should take about 2.5 hours per terabyte to transfer, at a day that's like 10TB/day, for a month that's 300TB! If you're moving that much data, the gigabit connection limitation is a bigger hurdle long before the 7200rpm comes into play. Just one of these 5400rpm easystores connected via usb 3.0 exceeds 150MB/sec. Is your data trillions of smaller files that add up to these sizes, if so I could see the minimal impact the 7200rpm would have with regard to seek times. My raid 6 array gets 350MB/sec reads and writes on average, which I can utilize due to the 10gbit fiber I have between my pc and the server, but otherwise it would be uselesss on plain gigabyte. This is likely compounded by multiple people sharing that gigabit connection to the server. I am very curious to hear more!
 
It is surprising that they would still honor the warranty if you just send back just a bare drive. Sure if you put it back in the enclosure but bare? It seem very YMMV nowadays if they will honor a schuck drive.
 
drescherjm said:
As for shucking, I leave the drive in its external enclosure until at least the warranty has expired. It works fine in my home setup as an external.
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I alrady have an external 4-drive bay, I don't need a bunch of over sized single drive bays cluttering up my living room.

Susquehannock said:
Too bad it does not a have a Black level drive inside.
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These a just for media storage, a black level drive would just be wasted.
 
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