Shucking External Hard Drive Enclosures for Cheap Storage

yes I am addicted to terabytes so in today's video I'm gonna talk about how I like to get my terabytes for cheaper [Music] what's up YouTube Jason here with buy my bits and in today's video I thought about doing a tutorial on how to shuck a harddrive but instead I wanted to just shuck this thing the wrong way and then talk about why I shuck external hard drives in the first place now by definition shucking an external hard drive is just removing the shell that it comes in and taking the bare drive and putting into your computer or your server it may sound like kind of a weird thing to do but believe me there's a good reason for it take this as an example this is a Western Digital 8 terabyte external USB 3.0 hard drive this thing plugs right into your computer it pops up as an external drive and you can use it just like any external hard drive would be used but this thing only cost me I think around 139 dollars it's a hundred and forty bucks for 8 terabytes of storage that is a little ridiculous especially because Western Digital red 8 terabyte drives normally go for 270 to 280 or more dollars on average so getting an 8 terabyte bare Western Digital red drive for a hundred and forty bucks that is what you call a deal now I can't sit here and tell you why I think they do this I don't know why the cells come into play I don't know why you can get them cheaper than normally but I can tell you that it doesn't happen all the time so if you do happen to find a cell where they're selling something like this for basically half of what of a normal hard drive would cost I would probably jump on it this particular drive I purchased from Best Buy I actually ordered it online even though I could have went into the store and just bought him right there but at the time when the sell was going on I really just didn't feel like driving to Best Buy to do it so sometimes vendors particularly Best Buy because that's where I seem to get the best deals built you know maybe they overstock on them maybe they want to clear some inventory out I don't know randomly they decide hey let's sell an excess of hard drives that we have or a heck of a lot cheaper than what the bear hard drive should go for and that's where you get this comes completely capable of hooking up to any USB 3.0 port or 2.0 port for that matter and you can use it really easily and that's all good and well nothing against that whatsoever but I have a server I have needs and I'm addicted to terabytes so I'm definitely gonna be shucking this today and throwing it in my zoo server and again don't look at this video as a tutorial on how to shuck a drive because I don't plan on doing it the right way cuz I'm just gonna throw this whole external enclosure away and yes there are tutorials out there on how to shuck it properly if you want to maintain the plastic tabs inside to be able to put it back together in the future but for today's video I'm just gonna rip this thing apart with my experience and I've shocked a few of these before with the Western Digital drives like this the external USB drives they usually come in Western Digital red varieties I've seen online that sometimes they don't come with the Western Digital reg sometimes they come with you know maybe cheaper hard drives that Western Digital has to offer so technically it is kind of a gamble in fact I found a reddit post where it says you know even if you read online and you find you know other people have gotten the same exact Drive and they've gotten a Western Digital read that doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to get a read if you were to get one yourself it just means that the chances are higher and I wanted to say that because in reality if I open this thing up and it has like a green Drive in it or something else that's cheaper I don't know if there is I'm definitely going to be let down I'm not saying I won't use it but I will still be let down but out of all the other hard drives that like this that I have sucked before they all have been Western Digital red so I have pretty high hopes that it's going to be a red now to do this of course I do have a knife and I do have a set of screwdrivers here I wasn't entirely sure which one I would need but I do know that I will need a Torx screwdriver so hopefully that should be in here somewhere it's like I got one more tab or maybe two more tab so here you have it an 8 terabyte drive not a Western Digital read so right here on camera is the first time I've ever experienced that not that I'm completely led down but I really would have liked to see a red drive in here editing Jason here looks like after doing a little bit of research online this is still technically a Western Digital red drive it just has a different label these are referenced as white label drives during my research I found that some people had issues using this drive with normal SATA power cables something about a 3.3 reset voltage pin that was enabled on this drive that's not on normal drives if this is true you may need some additional modifications to your power cables in order to get the drive to spin up and as another side note I paid 129 dollars for this drive not a hundred and thirty nine dollars that is all continue just one of those things right I didn't really plan on returning it taking it back in fact I've been sitting on this drive for a while so probably outside of my warranty as it is I mean my return policy as it is removing this little USB adapter for the SATA ports pretty simple usually it's just one little screw of regular Phillips head screw driver take this screw out pull this out and boom good to go now on the sides here these are where you have the Torx screws these are a little bit different so you will need to find something that's going to fit that and that is not it t8 ooh t8 is pretty close pretty close but I think a t9 it's gonna be better fit yes t9 Torx that is what you want and just like that I have an 8 terabyte Western Digital white drive still gonna use it throw it and Zeus my unright server run it through a couple cycles of zero and out the drive to see if there's any errors and fall goes well it's gonna be a double parity for my server not actually gaining any capacity in my server this is more of just a protection on my part to run a double parity and make sure that if I do end up losing two drives while I'm rebuilding a parity for whatever reason this will be a backup so back to the original point guys look out for cells like this if you want nice cheap storage this might be an option to look into I would definitely recommend not going the same route I did when it comes to chucking the external enclosure mainly because if you do it right you can pretty much take these off these little these little plastic tabs here you can push like a credit card or whatever onto each side and you can shuck this thing without actually breaking it and if you're able to shuck it without breaking it and you realize it's not a red drive and that's what you really wanted then you could potentially return the whole thing again I wasn't worried about that because I have no intentions of returning it I want to use this thing no matter what I mean a hundred and forty dollars for an eight terabyte drive that is just too good to pass up no matter what color the drive is so guys look out for those cells if you find anything like this that are Western Digital specific whether it's in the four terabyte or a terabyte variant definitely hit me up and underscore byte my bits on Twitter I would love to hear about in fact the last two times that I shucked drives like this was actually from Twitter people sending me links to the cells that they found and then of course I like to share those links with the rest of my followers but that's it for today thank you for watching a like and subscribe below if you have any questions of course leave them down below as well and have yourself a good day

Channel: Byte My Bits

Views: 197,905

Keywords: Drive, shuck, shucking, external, storage, bare, hard, disk, usb, server, cheap, sale, warranty

Id: 24bS7a6rPoQ

Length: 8min 46sec (526 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 02 2018