Using An External Hard Drive as Internal (Shucking WD My Book)

hey guys Tech Guy Charlie here and welcome back to the channel so in this video we're gonna take apart this brand new external storage from WD and repurpose the 8 terabyte hard drive inside this and use it as an internal hard drive in our desktop PC and these eight terabyte my books have a pretty fast 7200 RPM Drive which should make for a great high performance desktop drive and not to mention it's a CMR Drive which is awesome so I'm gonna walk you through the entire process of how it's done alright so let's begin now because we are doing this to a brand new drive there are a couple of extra steps that you want to do before you take it out of its casing but if you're already using one that is tried and tested then skip to the disassembly process okay so first on your PC you want to go to this website and download and install the WT Drive utilities I've already got it installed so going to launch this and now we are going to plug in the my book into our PC so these desktop drives are actually quite cumbersome it has its own power supply which doesn't really make it portable okay so once you have the drive connected it should show up on the PC and here it is now the next thing you want to do is run a complete drive test in the WD drive utility software this will scan the entire drive for any bad sectors and it is necessary that you do this to a brand new hard drive just in case if there are any defects or any bad sectors they are gonna show up here and the reason why we are doing this right now is because taking the drive out of its casing will most likely avoid its warranty so just in case if any defects pop up you can easily return or are a midi drive before taking it apart and this is going to take couple of hours as this is a large capacity drive so just let the test run and lastly if you are actually using the drive make sure all of the password protection and encryption features are turned off before you take it out of its casing because once the drive is inside your PC it will function as a normal internal hard drive so the password protection and encryption features will not work so you will have to make sure that they are first turned off in the WD software and once the drive passes the test we can now safely disconnect the drive and start with the test assembly procedure now you will need two things to properly disassemble the WD my book drive so get yourself at least four guitar picks and a screwdriver with a Phillips head and a hex 2.0 bit a multi-bit screwdriver should have all of these okay so once you have all of these ready let's start disassembling so flip the enclosure upside down now grab a guitar pick and wedge it around the corners you know what let me just zoom in so that you can get a better view now where were we oh yeah grab a guitar pick and wedge it around the events until you hear a click that is the sound of the clips popping out I am actually doing this the second time because the first time I forgot to press the record button that is why you can see some marks in the plastic right here anyways there are four Clips holding the enclosure in place so you will have to do this with all four guitar picks so once you have all four picks in place gently push the drive out and it should come out of its enclosure there you go so this is the 8 terabyte drive that comes with the my book enclosure it's a wt-80 edbz and it's a 7200 RPM drive so pretty fast anyways for vibration dampening the drive is mounted on rubber grommets and there are four hex screws holding the drive in its place so grab the hex 2.0 bit and unscrew these four hex screws foreign once all four screws are loose flip the drive over and gently push it out of its internal enclosure and there you go now you can see there is a PCB attached to the drive and there is a Phillips head screw holding it in place so grab the Phillips head bit and remove the screw and then remove the PCB as you can see it is a standard SATA hard drive that we can use inside our desktop PC and keep in mind you cannot do this with every Drive in the market because some of them have proprietary connectors that are soldered onto the drive an example of this is the WD My Passport drive so you can see the connector is physically soldered onto the drive so it would be impossible to use this as an internal hard drive so there are very specific external drives that you can chuck now all you have to do is install the drive in your PC and I've got one empty three and a half inch hard drive slot so I will install it over here so we will insert the drive connect the SATA and the power cable and we are pretty much good to go okay so let's power the PC on then go into the BIOS and see if the motherboard even detects the new drive and it does you can see the new Drive is showing up in the Bios right here it's plugged in into the third SATA port so this means you don't need that nasty 3.3 volt mod with this specific power supply which is the Corsair rm1000x you see the thing is with some power supplies these shocked WD white label drives will not work in a desktop PC so if you have this issue then you will need to cover the third pin from the left with Captain tape to cut the 3.3 volt signal to the hard drive this website shows you how to do it so I will put its Link in the video's description but thankfully with this power supply I did not face any issues so let's boot into windows and test the drive out all right so here it is a brand new mt8 terabyte external drive repurposed as an internal it still shows up as my book so you will have to rename it to something else we will do that later one more thing you will notice is that the WD software will not detect the drive anymore this is because it's no longer a USB device and this is completely normal nothing to worry about so now let's move on to the benchmarks first off I ran Crystal desk Mark and here are the results gotta say I am quite pleased as how the drive performs it is certainly faster than the 6 terabyte version of the WD My Book which is a 5400 RPM drive and if you are wondering here is the test result of the 6 terabyte mybook which is also a shocked drive inside the PC as you can see the 8 terabyte version is far superior in every way possible now one interesting observation is that this drive performs slightly better if it is plugged in into the SATA port of the motherboard versus when it is inside the enclosure and this was attached into a USB 3.2 Gen 2 port and here is a side-by-side comparison between the two it's not a huge difference it is certainly within the margin of error but yeah kinda interesting I also copied over some large video files to test out the raw file transfer speed and got a sustained write speed of about 170 to 180 megabytes per second and just so you know we are copying from an SSD onto the 8 terabyte drive so the bottleneck should be the 8 terabyte drive itself then I also copied over about 3400 photos to see how the drive keeps up and got a similar write speed of about 170 to 180 megabytes per second which is pretty decent and copying files from the 8 terabyte drive onto an SSD gives us a sustained raid speed of about 200 plus megabytes per second which is awesome and here is a screenshot of Crystal diskmark now what I've noticed is that this drive runs a little hot at about 43 degree celsius when the PC is Idle compare this to the 5400 RPM Drive which is running much cooler at 36 degrees this is almost after 6 hours of the PC just sitting and idling away now after copying almost 450 gigabyte worth of files the temperature was at about 47 degrees Celsius meanwhile the 5400 RPM Drive ran much cooler at 40 degrees Celsius and this is also a shocked drive from a six terabyte my book enclosure now keep in mind 47 degrees Celsius is completely normal for a drive that has seen recent activity as long as it stays below 50 we should be okay now I know someone is going to ask can you use other hard drives in the WD My Book enclosure well unfortunately the answer is no I actually tried it with another WD drive a wd blue to be exact the drive actually spins and the computer is able to detect that there is a USB drive plugged in but it does not show up in this PC and the device manager was asking me to initialize the drive which I did and it failed so it seems as if the USB controller on the board is paired with the drive the enclosure originally ships with so no you cannot use any other drive with this enclosure also I have not noticed any difference in the noise levels the PC is super quiet and right now we are transferring files over to the new hard drive and there is absolutely no noise by the way I am using these foam pads to dampen the humming noise coming from the PC and going into the microphone and yes this does help out a lot but overall the PC is extremely quiet so that brings us to the end of the video now if you guys have any questions feel free to leave a comment down below and I'll try and answer them and if you found the video to be helpful make sure to hit the like button and subscribe to the channel thank you for watching and I'll see you guys in the next video

Channel: Tech Guy Charlie

Views: 6,316

Keywords: wd my book disassembly, how to shuck hard drive, wd easystore shuck, how to use external hard drive on pc, external drive as internal, wd white label drives

Id: HuhT6fo7GsY

Length: 10min 46sec (646 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 13 2022