I had 2 shucked seagate drives die within days of each other. When I called for rma they said no. I told her thank you and that I was going to replace them with WD drives, she had a change of heart. I recommend people do what I keep forgetting to do and mark on the drives which enclosure they came from and keep the enclosures. That way you can put them back and rma, you can always say you unshucked it trying to fix it😀. I had no problems with WD.
There is something you are missing. IF the drive happens to be SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) type drive inside the enclosure, it's a more cheaply manufactured drive vs CMR or PMR made drives. I'm also an Tech Consultant. I would not shuck an external, unless that external is solely going to be used for either a backup only drive (few writes more reads), or stashing a media library of pics/music/videos (again less overall writes and more reads). I would strongly suggest against using an SMR drive as a Windows NTFS C boot drive or a MAC HFS+ or LInux boot drive with any Linux file system with journal ability. Stick with a CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) or PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) type drive for main system drive and SMR for archive or media library. I had a client who had external 2.5" SMR 2TB drives being used as main purpose drives (work/scratch) and they died in less than 2 years and they lost all their data. I would rather buy my own CMR/PMR type drive and put it in an enclosure that I choose. Be careful a lot of the newer higher capacity external drives have a high chance of being SMR. So shuck at your own risk if you don't care about your data long term. In 2021, your boot/OS drive should be SSD/NVME.
@@_Clivey A pause should not happen at all. A modern OS would use your RAM as a buffer. For example, if you copy from one HDD to another HDD, the OS reads from HDD1 and writes to RAM and begins writing to HDD2 which most likely will be a slow operation. The RAM usage will go up and up. In Linux, you can throw at it as much RAM as you like. It will use as much as it can as a buffer. Win 7 does buffering as well but I don’t know how it compares to Linux.
ABSOLUTELY!! I got a Seagate 5TB external hard drive. As usual, the USB interface failed in a short space of time. It was a gift so I didn't have any proof of purchase. Long and very painfuI story cut very short, I lost the the entire 5TB of my personal data. I didn't find out until later that these horrors were actually SMR drives. This happened some years ago, so I am remembering as best I can.. Windows, of course, was useless in trying to recover or repair it, despite having recovery software. My trusty Linux system was significantly more helpful. They actually have (or show up as having) two partitions on them, one is a small one that acts as a data buffer area and is supposedly non-SMR and the rest of the drive is SMR. In theory, if the drive is left powered up then it is supposed to move data from the non-SMR region to the SMR region. In reality, the power management (in the USB interface side of things) was far too aggressive to enable this to happen. I was hoping to find a firnware that would enable me to low-level format the drive to a non-SMR drive albeit of a somewhat smaller capacity as I would rather have a small, but useful, drive that a doorstop. In the I somehow managed to reformat the entire drive, using Linux, as one volume and have been able to read and write files. I haven't (yet) dared risk anything important again on this drive, even though it appears to be functional at its 5TB capacity. In case anyone is wondering, It was far too easy to completely screw up this drive. I work with large video files; hence the need of a larger drive. What happened is that I changed my mind with one of the files on the drive and tried to delete it, before copying over a different file. This was all it took to completely trash the drive and (almost) lose all the data. I say almost because I was able to recover a couple of files from the non-SMR portion of the drive before it had lost them in the SMR portion. SMR = (data) Shredding Magentic Recording
Alternatively, you can mysteriously find random assortments of hard drives lying around your house after years of taking apart old prebuilts, laptops and TV boxes lol
Yep, I looked around and found three 2 TB drives, plus 2 new 2 TB drives, a half a dozen 1 TB drives, a handful of 500GB drives, plus Twelve 4 TB drives plus another twelve 3 TB drives..
I have been doing this for a very long time for all of the reasons you have mentioned in your video. Shucking as you call it (great name for it) has become standard practice for me. I also get a nice USB Cable and a 12v dc power adapter to boot (no pun intended). I can tell you with absolute certainty as a tech with over 30 years of hardware experience that the 8TB Barracuda External from Costco for example I bought for $109 on sale, bought 3 of them to make a nice RAID 5 array. I compared it to an off the shelf bare Seagate 8tb Barracuda Drive only from Newegg. Firmware was the SAME EXACT VERSION. In the case of RAID you DO want your firmware to be the same version if at all possible. Sometimes it will work anyway but I have seen cases where the raid array will be slower, stutter or have strange issues if the firmware is vastly different. Of course this also depends on your RAID Controller and how tolerant it is to having different drives in the array. Awesome video though and I am glad someone has put this info out there. I try to share it with friends and colleagues as the cost difference in the case of the 8TB Seagate Barracudas for the 3 drives I bought at $109 = $327, the same drive with internal only $169 x 3 = $507, difference of: $180.00 enough money to buy a COLD SPARE drive! That is a HUGE difference in price. You are dead on when you said the lady from Seagate spilled the beans so to speak. They charge more for the internal drive because they are banking on the fact that most people who will buy an internal only drive are builders or people who WILL PAY IT, vs just anyone who can buy a USB drive and hook it up and go.
Keep in mind, though, that external hard drives are also usually devices that did not make the 5/5 Star internal quality testing. So you can save some bucks but but end up with a drive that dies earlier.
That totally makes sense. Demand drives price. But I can also imagine that when they release a new generation of internal drives, the remaining stock of older drives could be sold as external.
the real simple explanation here is that majority of people that have a little knowledge about tech stuff are not risking opening and damaging an external hard drive to use as an internal disk.
Great video. Wasn't expecting the phone call. The only reason I can see ordering internal drives is if you are wanting to do a raid configuration and need to be certain the drives match. Still, fo a regular rig this is for sure the way to go.
10:05 NO She told: we target different markets. NOT we target different demographic! A lot different. Demographic: gender, age, and so on. Market: PC Type (Desktop or Portale or Server) thus use cases, etc. Yes Market can contain demographic but it's not forcely implicit
When you open the external to find an enterprise drive you can find an internal drive model appears to be exactly the same. They may have 3 drive models to pick from so if you want to use in a NAS, a random 8 may have different mixture of models in the external cases (same external model number). This depends on what drives they have excess of in stock. Warranty & data recovery service on the full retail internal drive will be better than the 1 or 2yr warranty of the external drive. Warranty & support are a large cost of the overall price but supply&demand is also a factor. YMMV. Do you pay less up front to pay more later? or the reverse?
One drawback that immediately comes to mind is CMR vs SMR. I have never seen an 8 TB external HDD with CMR from WD or Seagate in the past decade, so if you are shucking to build a NAS, you should know what the implications are. If you've never had to wait 1 week for a RAID 5 rebuild, count yourself lucky and hope you never have to experience that lol
Ive been doing this since 2014 and have a 100% success rate. I would recommend not attempting this on WD slim drives because they dont have a sata connector, just USB 3 or type C. I know this because I own a bunch of "pi-drives" which were a promotional 314GB HDD for the raspberry pi back in the day. Its just a bare drive. For WD HDDs, you usually need to use the diskpart utility from an elevated command prompt. Select the disk, then clean the disk, then use disk mannager to partition it. Takes only a minute, but dont mess up using disk part, i haven't, but its easy for a simple typo to ruin your day.
Thanks so much for your video, really helpful! I use large capacity drives for films & OBS recorded course lectures etc.. My external 2Tb WD Book suddenly refused to be visible on the PC. Was lucky to find an internal Seagate 6 Tb IronWolf Pro which came with 3 years recovery for £122, which I now use via a Wavlink SATA drive caddy. As my external WB Book 2Tb now refuses to be detected by file explorer even though I can hear it spin into action, makes the familiar USB sound when plugged into the USD HUB yet refuses to appear in File Explorer. I wanted to ask if shucking that drive might help it appear on file explorer? Thanks so much! (P.S. Gone right off WD drives as I get the impression they have a higher failure rate)
@@RMDTech oh i see.I knew about internal they are both 5400 and 7200 rpm, but i thought all externals are 5400.Can you link me to some 7200 external please?
Smart lady that one, it's because it's targeted to different markets" very few will pay 200$ to packup their family pics, it's different market even if lower profitability they chose to capture it.
Usually the real reason external drives are cheaper is just lower margins for the external one (the target audience stuff), but most importantly, external drives usually come with better warranty (so, kind of mandatory extended warranty purchase). As mentioned, sometimes the external drive is neutered, but usually a tape is enough to ignore that. Be careful with blind purchases, I've seen WD that have the USB interface directly on the hardrive, thus no phisical compatibility with SATA (tho that also means a shorter drive, wich is good if the intended use is in fact external as is)
Just shucked 3 18TB WD Elements from Amazon £350 each for my QNap NAS. The disk are white label WD180EGGZ but I'm guessing they are rebadged Ultrastar DC HC550 looking at the P/N etc. or they could be Gold Ultrastar's. NAS reports them as 7200rpm with 512mb cache cheapest internal WD 18tb HDD I found was £590 Seagate £470 Largest internal HDD I found for same ££ was 14tb but 12tb was the general size at £350 I've never shucked HDDs before but it took 2min per, worked in NAS copied 5tb on to them to test worked no issues. I also tested if I could reassemble if needed to return took a little longer but no issues
Saving a few quid for sure, I wonder about the warranty or protection, whatever that may entail if something goes wrong.. Imagine if your back-up provider told you they shucked there drives from consumer portable units.. Nah! -it's nice to save 20%~30% in cash but I do like the warranty notion too.
Speed is also the price difference. External drives are slower because they go through a USB port instead of SATA. More people are looking for speed of storage.
I can tell you from experience that some external drives are not certified for long running in a pc so they take all the drives that fail testing in some way and as long as it is stable enough they put it in an external case assuming that it will see less power on time which will extend the life of that drive i used a 1Tb in my pc it lasted 1 year and failed so bad that it did not even show up in bios
I shucked 16tb drives which were Exos, registered them with Seagate and got the 5 year warranty come up,looked a year later and the warranty was expired so they basically updated their system and voided the warranty, so lost 4 years
I have had a number of external hard drives. All my external Seagate one died in short time. I also have a WD Elements and a WD My Book external drive. The ONLY drive still working to this day is my 4TB WD My Book, all the rest have FAILED. My advice is, if you value your data at all, buy a proper internal hard drive so that you know you have a full guarantee on a bare drive and you can make sure it is a NON-SMR drive. A lot of re-sellers will not allow an RMA if the drive has been tampered with (such as by opening the enclosure the drive came in).
For what I'm thinking on a business side, they might just be producing and selling more external drives than internal drives. So most likely, the external drives just sell better and they aren't too concerned with adding another plastic housing and cheap sata adapter to sell the product. And absolutely the internal drives are sold higher cause there is probably more demand from it in the tech builder market which is niche or for businesses which buy them up for servers or computers. Similar to Xeons vs the Intel "i" line up and how they sell. Then again, I'm a cheap man and will take the cheapest route possible 😂 Cool video!
Also external drives tend to be a little slower than expensive drives usually, 5400rpm vs 7200rpm and less cache so unfortunately not great game drives. But they are still good for mass storage
How do you know before you buy these external drives that the same drives are the exact model and version as the internal you are shopping for. The internal might be a high-end enterprise OS nas drive but the external case might be a low-end model that is slower, has less cache, is older, less reliable, or did not pass qa. I guess shucking might make sense if you are buying low-end drives. Or we're you able to confirm the drives were the exact model, age, and generation?
Great findings! I have noticed that external harddrives are cheaper as well. I recent bought a 5 TB 2.5" extern harddrive for a price of 135 dollars converted here in Sweden. The plan is to buy a second one and built both inside of a custom built case with a Raspberry Pi 4 as computer for the custom NAS :) I have an old file server stacked with a bunch of older 3.5" internal harddrives. 2-6 TB each. I think the total capacity is like 35 TB. I rearly uses it due to power consumsion and heat. I have so much other stuff like GPUs and such that takes much power and heat nowadays :)
be warned if you intend to shuck an External drive to use in a NAS and the shucked drive is an SMR type drive, your NAS will die sooner rather than last long. SMR drives are not meant for NAS use. SMR drives are meant for direct attached storage as archive or dumping a media library that doesn't change much. Think of SMR type hard drive as a CD-R or DVD-R, Write Once Read Many type of technology. IF you do regular writes and changes to an SMR drive the longevity of that SMR drive will go down very fast. Since you plan on a custom NAS which has lots of parity calculations and writing as well, not to mention just the normal data writing an SMR in a NAS array won't last long. You want a CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) or PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) type drive for a NAS. Use SMR in a NAS at your own risk. Drives inside of external enclosure don't usually have good online documentation if the drive inside is SMR tech or CMR tech.
@@marcc5768 The thing is (for me atleast) when using a NAS I'm just put the files there, not change or delete it. And read it sometimes. Like personal photos or movies, just like a DVD-R if you compair it. I will maybe accessing the NAS once in a week so the usage won't be high.
@@johanvirebrand7196 I used to run a RAID-5 storage array with 3 500GB SATA HDD. Established Array in 2nd quarter 2008. Two of the 3 drives are still good, but the 3rd drive I think parity drive that one died 2 years ago, so I backed up the contents from the RAID-5 and broke down the RAID to single disks again. So if your NAS is set up in RAID of some kind and SMR drives used as the parity info that will go sooner than Non SMR. Parity drives get more writes. Tho if the NAS is 2 drive mirror say, that could work better than a NAS setup that has parity included.
@@marcc5768 I have also used RAID-5 in my fileserver, but that was when 250-300 GB HDD was common. I had so much problems with the array, disks that were excluded and the array needed to be built up again. Was running on a cheap RAID card tho, well it wasn't worth the tangle. Just running single disks now, if it crashes it's not that important because the most valued files I have backuped up on many other places.
Nice to know. Thx. The other drawback could be an unsopported connection. Assumind IDE is far beyond expectation - should be pretty safe to say all shuckled ones would have a SATA ACONNECTION. am i correct?
Can someone tell me please , how much power a 6TB internal hard drive uses ? ( on official seagate website they mention 6.8 for all modesl , but 6.8 for what capacity ? 1tb consumes equal to 6tb capacity ? !!!!
Hi RMD Tech friends. Is there a 'tape a pinout' method to make a Seagate work as an internal drive (for Seagate drives that only work as an internal drive)? Western Digital has that 3rd pin on the contacts of the power to enable some WD drives. God bless, Rev. 21:4
It's the same thing. Kapton tape on pin 3 or use a molex to SATA power adapter, a SATA extender that specifically is missing the 3.3v, etc. It's actually not a manufacturer thing to stop shucking -- it's that they're using a lot of Enterprise drives in the external enclosoures, and those Enterprise drives support the newer SATA 3.2/3.3 specification. That specification includes a remote management feature called PWDIS (power disable) to let someone remotely power cycle the drive. In older SATA specs, pin 3 provides 3.3v power, but pretty much no SATA devices actually wound up using 3.3v power, so pin 3 was repurposed in the new spec for PWDIS. Basically any time the drive detects voltage coming through on pin 3 it triggers a reset. The problem is pretty much all consumer power supplies and many NAS devices use the old spec and thus put 3.3v on pin 3, so the drive gets stuck in a disabled state and never spins up.
huh thats weird,why they didnt charge more on externals one,its more costly on production and also if its apple like customer they are willing to buy those or is there a plot twist that they make internals expensive to make DIY External HDD isnt a viable option?
Great vid, good info and presentation with out being so long it's boring. My only critique would be to lose the vid running on your screen to the left. It's a bit distracting which means not 100% of my focus is on the information you obviously put much thought and time into. Other then that, great job.
It's the same crab that people have to pay for fancy colors more than tor only black, it's the customers people fold that they are willing to pay more and be scammed in my opinion for the same thing.
G'day RMD, Great video showing a way of saving money, although here in Australia unless they are on sale External Drives are generally more expensive than Internal for the same capacity, But I have pulled some External Drives apart & now used them internally because the USB to SATA Interface stopped working but the Drive was still fine, Also what I have noticed is you can also do this with the 2.5" External Drives as well, although unlike 3.5" don't expect all 2.5" drives to be compatible, some models do not have a USB to SATA Interface, there are quite a few models where the Drive Motherboard just has a USB Connector & not a USB to SATA Interface, Ps I also have a CoolerMaster N200 as a Storage PC, with 1SSD for Windows & the 8 Bays full of Unloved & Rescued (Used) 1-4TB 3'5" Hard Drives, I am using a ASRock Fatality Z77 Professional with a i3-3220 & Rescued Silverstone 1500W PSU, I use it as an Archive for Storing Home Video of Family & Friends when I Edit their Footage from Mobile Devices
G'day Shane! I always love a good money saving tactic, glad you do too! That's news to me, interesting to hear that the pricing makes more sense on your side of the planet! And yeah, you're right, 2.5" drives sometimes work, but are far less reliable for shucking purposes! Buy with caution! I love your storage PC! Sounds like a great little rig! Tweet me a pic!
I noticed the same thing a few weeks ago. When, I wanted to buy a new hard drive. I ended up buying an external Seagate 6TB from Argos. It only cost £99.99 from Argos and it was cheaper then buying a 6TB internal hard drive. Many years ago! When, I built my first ever PC with a Intel Duo Core 2 processer. It was a lot cheaper to buy a internal hard drive over a external hard drive. Crazy times we are living.
I would not trust an external drive long term if there is an SMR type drive in that enclosure. Shingled Magnetic Recording technology is on the sucky side and is more targeted at applications of few writes and more reads like stashing a media library of pics/music/videos that don't change often.
I have a lot of HDDs, all shucked. All my 1 TB drives, apart from one, are from WD external drives from around 2008-2010. The last one is a Samsung from around 2010. In total 4x 3.5" 1TB drives Then I have two 500 GB 2.5" drives from Seagate and one at 320 GB from Toshiba. From around 2010-2012 Then a 500 GB 3.5" and a 320 GB 3.5" from an unknown company. I have 2x 1 TB drives in one machine Then two desktops with 1 TB each. The 500 GB and 320 GB capacity drives are gonna be for WinXP Retro machine and Win98 respectively. The 2.5" drives are backups and/or transfer drives, though I might add one to one of my machines if need be.
With the speed of USB 3, and the fact that I use software RAID, I've found using the external drives as-is works well too. I have two USB 3 hubs, one plugged into each of the two USB 3 ports on my desktop. I keep my main storage, on one hub, the backup drives are on the second hub. When I want to backup each week, I just hit some switches to turn on the backup drives, run the backup program, then turn them off when done. I have multiple pairs of drives, which I treat as volumes, with files from different time periods. So the externals make it easy for me to swap out to find what I need. The biggest thing I don't like about the external drives is the power-down cycle. For internal drives, I can specify power-down after 2 hours of non-use, or whatever I choose. The external drives are often preset, non-user-changeable; with some drives having a ridiculously low 15-minute power-down time. I despise frequent powerdown. I have had two laptop drives fail after just a couple years, both of them had 1800-2100 hours of on time, but over 5000 spinups, according to SMART. I really don't think drives are designed to handle that many frequent starts.
@@RMDTech I could say the entire nintendo collection but I do think I am missing a few I have about every game from every Nintendo console and playstation I'm still getting the playstation 2 games to this day cause there are so many
The drives used in externals are designed for an enclosure and are more prone to damage and the environmental temps than a drive designed and built for internal pc. Though the external drive may seem just as good as the internal drive, the external drive outside the case will be more at risk of damage when removed than a built for internal use
My thoughts on this is the Internal Hard Drives are more expensive because these are going to be used by IT people or people who know waht they are doing. External is just connect and your away, even very simple for people like me. 😉😉😉
That woman is straight up lying for the company so people don't chuck. Generation difference barracuda hasn't made a new drive since 2018 XD XD what bs is she spitting she knows there is no difference there are lists of online forums telling what drives comes inside a external one so that you get the one you want at the rpm and cache you want
Just so you know boss, you aren't allowed to record calls without the other end knowing... you also didn't get permission from her to be in your video..
Call recording is legal in the UK. And it pretty much depends on the other party to pursue a civil (not criminal) case. America's laws don't apply elsewhere champ.
@@1centimetre I am in the UK 'champ' and it is not legal to record and distribute recordings of calls without permission. You can record them for personal use but distributing them to a third party.. i.e posting them online, without the other party's permission is not legal. Maybe read up on a subject before commenting next time ey.
Respect for the woman on the phone! She is competent and can give us helpful information! Thank you!
I had 2 shucked seagate drives die within days of each other. When I called for rma they said no. I told her thank you and that I was going to replace them with WD drives, she had a change of heart. I recommend people do what I keep forgetting to do and mark on the drives which enclosure they came from and keep the enclosures. That way you can put them back and rma, you can always say you unshucked it trying to fix it😀. I had no problems with WD.
My Seagate shucked drive was an external Exos, I put the serial number in their warranty checked and I get 5 years.
There is something you are missing. IF the drive happens to be SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) type drive inside the enclosure, it's a more cheaply manufactured drive vs CMR or PMR made drives. I'm also an Tech Consultant. I would not shuck an external, unless that external is solely going to be used for either a backup only drive (few writes more reads), or stashing a media library of pics/music/videos (again less overall writes and more reads). I would strongly suggest against using an SMR drive as a Windows NTFS C boot drive or a MAC HFS+ or LInux boot drive with any Linux file system with journal ability. Stick with a CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) or PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) type drive for main system drive and SMR for archive or media library. I had a client who had external 2.5" SMR 2TB drives being used as main purpose drives (work/scratch) and they died in less than 2 years and they lost all their data. I would rather buy my own CMR/PMR type drive and put it in an enclosure that I choose. Be careful a lot of the newer higher capacity external drives have a high chance of being SMR. So shuck at your own risk if you don't care about your data long term. In 2021, your boot/OS drive should be SSD/NVME.
This point is super important and cannot be overlooked, there is a significant difference between the drive technologies.
@@_Clivey A pause should not happen at all. A modern OS would use your RAM as a buffer. For example, if you copy from one HDD to another HDD, the OS reads from HDD1 and writes to RAM and begins writing to HDD2 which most likely will be a slow operation. The RAM usage will go up and up.
In Linux, you can throw at it as much RAM as you like. It will use as much as it can as a buffer.
Win 7 does buffering as well but I don’t know how it compares to Linux.
Drive reliability is why you set up a backup or RAID ! All my data drives AR shucked but I also have each one mirrored
@@ididnotkilljfk861 that is fine if you have a lot of money for a proper setup with RAID or something setup like xigmanas. Not everyone does.
ABSOLUTELY!! I got a Seagate 5TB external hard drive. As usual, the USB interface failed in a short space of time. It was a gift so I didn't have any proof of purchase. Long and very painfuI story cut very short, I lost the the entire 5TB of my personal data. I didn't find out until later that these horrors were actually SMR drives. This happened some years ago, so I am remembering as best I can..
Windows, of course, was useless in trying to recover or repair it, despite having recovery software. My trusty Linux system was significantly more helpful. They actually have (or show up as having) two partitions on them, one is a small one that acts as a data buffer area and is supposedly non-SMR and the rest of the drive is SMR. In theory, if the drive is left powered up then it is supposed to move data from the non-SMR region to the SMR region. In reality, the power management (in the USB interface side of things) was far too aggressive to enable this to happen.
I was hoping to find a firnware that would enable me to low-level format the drive to a non-SMR drive albeit of a somewhat smaller capacity as I would rather have a small, but useful, drive that a doorstop. In the I somehow managed to reformat the entire drive, using Linux, as one volume and have been able to read and write files. I haven't (yet) dared risk anything important again on this drive, even though it appears to be functional at its 5TB capacity.
In case anyone is wondering, It was far too easy to completely screw up this drive. I work with large video files; hence the need of a larger drive. What happened is that I changed my mind with one of the files on the drive and tried to delete it, before copying over a different file. This was all it took to completely trash the drive and (almost) lose all the data. I say almost because I was able to recover a couple of files from the non-SMR portion of the drive before it had lost them in the SMR portion.
SMR = (data) Shredding Magentic Recording
Alternatively, you can mysteriously find random assortments of hard drives lying around your house after years of taking apart old prebuilts, laptops and TV boxes lol
Yeah I found a 500GB external lol
Yep, I looked around and found three 2 TB drives, plus 2 new 2 TB drives, a half a dozen 1 TB drives, a handful of 500GB drives, plus Twelve 4 TB drives plus another twelve 3 TB drives..
@@MrPir84free guy wtf
@@MrPir84free bro hwo df just have a bunch off 4 tb hdd lying around
@@anuraagsrinivasan3292 I have a couple of 1 TB hard drives lying around and maybe 3 500 GB but I am not as big as a collector as Mad Dawg.
That was thorough. Hope your channel goes viral.
I have been doing this for a very long time for all of the reasons you have mentioned in your video. Shucking as you call it (great name for it) has become standard practice for me. I also get a nice USB Cable and a 12v dc power adapter to boot (no pun intended). I can tell you with absolute certainty as a tech with over 30 years of hardware experience that the 8TB Barracuda External from Costco for example I bought for $109 on sale, bought 3 of them to make a nice RAID 5 array. I compared it to an off the shelf bare Seagate 8tb Barracuda Drive only from Newegg. Firmware was the SAME EXACT VERSION. In the case of RAID you DO want your firmware to be the same version if at all possible. Sometimes it will work anyway but I have seen cases where the raid array will be slower, stutter or have strange issues if the firmware is vastly different. Of course this also depends on your RAID Controller and how tolerant it is to having different drives in the array. Awesome video though and I am glad someone has put this info out there. I try to share it with friends and colleagues as the cost difference in the case of the 8TB Seagate Barracudas for the 3 drives I bought at $109 = $327, the same drive with internal only $169 x 3 = $507, difference of: $180.00 enough money to buy a COLD SPARE drive! That is a HUGE difference in price. You are dead on when you said the lady from Seagate spilled the beans so to speak. They charge more for the internal drive because they are banking on the fact that most people who will buy an internal only drive are builders or people who WILL PAY IT, vs just anyone who can buy a USB drive and hook it up and go.
Keep in mind, though, that external hard drives are also usually devices that did not make the 5/5 Star internal quality testing. So you can save some bucks but but end up with a drive that dies earlier.
Not according to BackBlaze testing data.
That totally makes sense. Demand drives price. But I can also imagine that when they release a new generation of internal drives, the remaining stock of older drives could be sold as external.
Yea, tho o on high capacity units you usually are guaranteed to get top tier drives, as that's the only in production
the real simple explanation here is that majority of people that have a little knowledge about tech stuff are not risking opening and damaging an external hard drive to use as an internal disk.
Great video. Wasn't expecting the phone call. The only reason I can see ordering internal drives is if you are wanting to do a raid configuration and need to be certain the drives match. Still, fo a regular rig this is for sure the way to go.
Yeah, that is definitely a reason to avoid doing this, but for all other purposes, shuck on!
UnRaid loves these drives and you can mix and match as big as your parity drive is
10:05 NO She told: we target different markets. NOT we target different demographic! A lot different.
Demographic: gender, age, and so on.
Market: PC Type (Desktop or Portale or Server) thus use cases, etc.
Yes Market can contain demographic but it's not forcely implicit
Im just in the process of RMA'ing a drive that went defective after
Some external drive cases are glued together, so sending them back for RMA is a bit trickier
When you open the external to find an enterprise drive you can find an internal drive model appears to be exactly the same. They may have 3 drive models to pick from so if you want to use in a NAS, a random 8 may have different mixture of models in the external cases (same external model number). This depends on what drives they have excess of in stock. Warranty & data recovery service on the full retail internal drive will be better than the 1 or 2yr warranty of the external drive. Warranty & support are a large cost of the overall price but supply&demand is also a factor. YMMV. Do you pay less up front to pay more later? or the reverse?
It ia more of clearing stock of lower grades hdd than demand/supply factor.
There is another thing to look for: sometimes, companies don't put a standard SATA connection on the external drives (WD does this more often).
yes but DON'T use them for NAS, if integrity on your data and HW reliability is required. This can be done just for PC home purpose for sure.
One drawback that immediately comes to mind is CMR vs SMR. I have never seen an 8 TB external HDD with CMR from WD or Seagate in the past decade, so if you are shucking to build a NAS, you should know what the implications are. If you've never had to wait 1 week for a RAID 5 rebuild, count yourself lucky and hope you never have to experience that lol
Ive been doing this since 2014 and have a 100% success rate. I would recommend not attempting this on WD slim drives because they dont have a sata connector, just USB 3 or type C. I know this because I own a bunch of "pi-drives" which were a promotional 314GB HDD for the raspberry pi back in the day. Its just a bare drive.
For WD HDDs, you usually need to use the diskpart utility from an elevated command prompt. Select the disk, then clean the disk, then use disk mannager to partition it. Takes only a minute, but dont mess up using disk part, i haven't, but its easy for a simple typo to ruin your day.
Man I hate how underrated this channel is for the great production quality
Guess the only way to fix that is to like and share the video! 😉
@@RMDTech done and done
Thanks so much for your video, really helpful! I use large capacity drives for films & OBS recorded course lectures etc.. My external 2Tb WD Book suddenly refused to be visible on the PC. Was lucky to find an internal Seagate 6 Tb IronWolf Pro which came with 3 years recovery for £122, which I now use via a Wavlink SATA drive caddy. As my external WB Book 2Tb now refuses to be detected by file explorer even though I can hear it spin into action, makes the familiar USB sound when plugged into the USD HUB yet refuses to appear in File Explorer. I wanted to ask if shucking that drive might help it appear on file explorer? Thanks so much! (P.S. Gone right off WD drives as I get the impression they have a higher failure rate)
yes its worth a go -also use the win10 'victoria' HD program on it... set to 100ms..takes a long time but worth it to remap the bad blocks-
Are not all external hard drives 5400 rpm vs the regular internals that are 7200 rpm?
Nope! Many external drives are the full 7200rpm. And many internal drives are 5400rpm too.
@@RMDTech oh i see.I knew about internal they are both 5400 and 7200 rpm, but i thought all externals are 5400.Can you link me to some 7200 external please?
Smart lady that one, it's because it's targeted to different markets" very few will pay 200$ to packup their family pics, it's different market even if lower profitability they chose to capture it.
Usually the real reason external drives are cheaper is just lower margins for the external one (the target audience stuff), but most importantly, external drives usually come with better warranty (so, kind of mandatory extended warranty purchase).
As mentioned, sometimes the external drive is neutered, but usually a tape is enough to ignore that. Be careful with blind purchases, I've seen WD that have the USB interface directly on the hardrive, thus no phisical compatibility with SATA (tho that also means a shorter drive, wich is good if the intended use is in fact external as is)
Nowadays you cannot even shuck a new 2.5 hdd, as the pcb board hdd is mounted with a usb connector instead of a sata connector.
Just shucked 3 18TB WD Elements from Amazon £350 each for my QNap NAS. The disk are white label WD180EGGZ but I'm guessing they are rebadged Ultrastar DC HC550 looking at the P/N etc. or they could be Gold Ultrastar's. NAS reports them as 7200rpm with 512mb cache cheapest internal WD 18tb HDD I found was £590 Seagate £470 Largest internal HDD I found for same ££ was 14tb but 12tb was the general size at £350
I've never shucked HDDs before but it took 2min per, worked in NAS copied 5tb on to them to test worked no issues.
I also tested if I could reassemble if needed to return took a little longer but no issues
Saving a few quid for sure, I wonder about the warranty or protection, whatever that may entail if something goes wrong.. Imagine if your back-up provider told you they shucked there drives from consumer portable units.. Nah! -it's nice to save 20%~30% in cash but I do like the warranty notion too.
Speed is also the price difference. External drives are slower because they go through a USB port instead of SATA. More people are looking for speed of storage.
I can tell you from experience that some external drives are not certified for long running in a pc so they take all the drives that fail testing in some way and as long as it is stable enough they put it in an external case assuming that it will see less power on time which will extend the life of that drive i used a 1Tb in my pc it lasted 1 year and failed so bad that it did not even show up in bios
I shucked 16tb drives which were Exos, registered them with Seagate and got the 5 year warranty come up,looked a year later and the warranty was expired so they basically updated their system and voided the warranty, so lost 4 years
I have had a number of external hard drives. All my external Seagate one died in short time. I also have a WD Elements and a WD My Book external drive. The ONLY drive still working to this day is my 4TB WD My Book, all the rest have FAILED.
My advice is, if you value your data at all, buy a proper internal hard drive so that you know you have a full guarantee on a bare drive and you can make sure it is a NON-SMR drive. A lot of re-sellers will not allow an RMA if the drive has been tampered with (such as by opening the enclosure the drive came in).
For what I'm thinking on a business side, they might just be producing and selling more external drives than internal drives. So most likely, the external drives just sell better and they aren't too concerned with adding another plastic housing and cheap sata adapter to sell the product. And absolutely the internal drives are sold higher cause there is probably more demand from it in the tech builder market which is niche or for businesses which buy them up for servers or computers. Similar to Xeons vs the Intel "i" line up and how they sell. Then again, I'm a cheap man and will take the cheapest route possible 😂
Cool video!
Also external drives tend to be a little slower than expensive drives usually, 5400rpm vs 7200rpm and less cache so unfortunately not great game drives. But they are still good for mass storage
This really does depend on the external drives you buy, the ones featured in this video are all 7200rpm drives, perfectly good for games storage
@@RMDTech yeah I still use a shucked 10tb drive for mass storage although it's 5400rpm it was still a decent deal for like $160 lol.
How do you know before you buy these external drives that the same drives are the exact model and version as the internal you are shopping for. The internal might be a high-end enterprise OS nas drive but the external case might be a low-end model that is slower, has less cache, is older, less reliable, or did not pass qa. I guess shucking might make sense if you are buying low-end drives. Or we're you able to confirm the drives were the exact model, age, and generation?
Great findings! I have noticed that external harddrives are cheaper as well. I recent bought a 5 TB 2.5" extern harddrive for a price of 135 dollars converted here in Sweden. The plan is to buy a second one and built both inside of a custom built case with a Raspberry Pi 4 as computer for the custom NAS :)
I have an old file server stacked with a bunch of older 3.5" internal harddrives. 2-6 TB each. I think the total capacity is like 35 TB. I rearly uses it due to power consumsion and heat. I have so much other stuff like GPUs and such that takes much power and heat nowadays :)
be warned if you intend to shuck an External drive to use in a NAS and the shucked drive is an SMR type drive, your NAS will die sooner rather than last long. SMR drives are not meant for NAS use. SMR drives are meant for direct attached storage as archive or dumping a media library that doesn't change much. Think of SMR type hard drive as a CD-R or DVD-R, Write Once Read Many type of technology. IF you do regular writes and changes to an SMR drive the longevity of that SMR drive will go down very fast. Since you plan on a custom NAS which has lots of parity calculations and writing as well, not to mention just the normal data writing an SMR in a NAS array won't last long. You want a CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) or PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) type drive for a NAS. Use SMR in a NAS at your own risk. Drives inside of external enclosure don't usually have good online documentation if the drive inside is SMR tech or CMR tech.
@@marcc5768 The thing is (for me atleast) when using a NAS I'm just put the files there, not change or delete it. And read it sometimes. Like personal photos or movies, just like a DVD-R if you compair it. I will maybe accessing the NAS once in a week so the usage won't be high.
@@johanvirebrand7196 I used to run a RAID-5 storage array with 3 500GB SATA HDD. Established Array in 2nd quarter 2008. Two of the 3 drives are still good, but the 3rd drive I think parity drive that one died 2 years ago, so I backed up the contents from the RAID-5 and broke down the RAID to single disks again. So if your NAS is set up in RAID of some kind and SMR drives used as the parity info that will go sooner than Non SMR. Parity drives get more writes. Tho if the NAS is 2 drive mirror say, that could work better than a NAS setup that has parity included.
@@marcc5768 I have also used RAID-5 in my fileserver, but that was when 250-300 GB HDD was common. I had so much problems with the array, disks that were excluded and the array needed to be built up again. Was running on a cheap RAID card tho, well it wasn't worth the tangle. Just running single disks now, if it crashes it's not that important because the most valued files I have backuped up on many other places.
@@johanvirebrand7196 Had RAID5 3*4TB and it was pure pain to use.
Nice to know. Thx. The other drawback could be an unsopported connection. Assumind IDE is far beyond expectation - should be pretty safe to say all shuckled ones would have a SATA ACONNECTION. am i correct?
Yes, they should all be SATA 3.0
Can someone tell me please , how much power a 6TB internal hard drive uses ? ( on official seagate website they mention 6.8 for all modesl , but 6.8 for what capacity ? 1tb consumes equal to 6tb capacity ? !!!!
What about the drive warranty? Void?
Different market as in "people who know what they're doing, and likely buy multiple so we will mark up"
That is excellent information!
Have a good day! :)
Thanks! You too!
Hi RMD Tech friends. Is there a 'tape a pinout' method to make a Seagate work as an internal drive (for Seagate drives that only work as an internal drive)?
Western Digital has that 3rd pin on the contacts of the power to enable some WD drives.
God bless, Rev. 21:4
It's the same thing. Kapton tape on pin 3 or use a molex to SATA power adapter, a SATA extender that specifically is missing the 3.3v, etc. It's actually not a manufacturer thing to stop shucking -- it's that they're using a lot of Enterprise drives in the external enclosoures, and those Enterprise drives support the newer SATA 3.2/3.3 specification. That specification includes a remote management feature called PWDIS (power disable) to let someone remotely power cycle the drive.
In older SATA specs, pin 3 provides 3.3v power, but pretty much no SATA devices actually wound up using 3.3v power, so pin 3 was repurposed in the new spec for PWDIS. Basically any time the drive detects voltage coming through on pin 3 it triggers a reset. The problem is pretty much all consumer power supplies and many NAS devices use the old spec and thus put 3.3v on pin 3, so the drive gets stuck in a disabled state and never spins up.
@@evilcoleslaw Hi there's no way to make it into an external drive then? If there is, could you tell me or point me to a link? Thank you.
huh thats weird,why they didnt charge more on externals one,its more costly on production and also if its apple like customer they are willing to buy those
or is there a plot twist that they make internals expensive to make DIY External HDD isnt a viable option?
Great vid, good info and presentation with out being so long it's boring. My only critique would be to lose the vid running on your screen to the left. It's a bit distracting which means not 100% of my focus is on the information you obviously put much thought and time into. Other then that, great job.
Actually, my drive I have, a "WD My Passport" isn't even a SATA drive, it's a, wait for it... USB 3.0/micro-b connector
It's the same crab that people have to pay for fancy colors more than tor only black, it's the customers people fold that they are willing to pay more and be scammed in my opinion for the same thing.
G'day RMD,
Great video showing a way of saving money, although here in Australia unless they are on sale External Drives are generally more expensive than Internal for the same capacity,
But I have pulled some External Drives apart & now used them internally because the USB to SATA Interface stopped working but the Drive was still fine,
Also what I have noticed is you can also do this with the 2.5" External Drives as well, although unlike 3.5" don't expect all 2.5" drives to be compatible,
some models do not have a USB to SATA Interface, there are quite a few models where the Drive Motherboard just has a USB Connector & not a USB to SATA Interface,
Ps I also have a CoolerMaster N200 as a Storage PC, with 1SSD for Windows & the 8 Bays full of Unloved & Rescued (Used) 1-4TB 3'5" Hard Drives, I am using a ASRock Fatality Z77 Professional with a i3-3220 & Rescued Silverstone 1500W PSU, I use it as an Archive for Storing Home Video of Family & Friends when I Edit their Footage from Mobile Devices
G'day Shane!
I always love a good money saving tactic, glad you do too! That's news to me, interesting to hear that the pricing makes more sense on your side of the planet!
And yeah, you're right, 2.5" drives sometimes work, but are far less reliable for shucking purposes! Buy with caution!
I love your storage PC! Sounds like a great little rig! Tweet me a pic!
I found that the internal drive and the external drives are the same price
I noticed the same thing a few weeks ago. When, I wanted to buy a new hard drive. I ended up buying an external Seagate 6TB from Argos. It only cost £99.99 from Argos and it was cheaper then buying a 6TB internal hard drive. Many years ago! When, I built my first ever PC with a Intel Duo Core 2 processer. It was a lot cheaper to buy a internal hard drive over a external hard drive. Crazy times we are living.
I would not trust an external drive long term if there is an SMR type drive in that enclosure. Shingled Magnetic Recording technology is on the sucky side and is more targeted at applications of few writes and more reads like stashing a media library of pics/music/videos that don't change often.
I have a lot of HDDs, all shucked.
All my 1 TB drives, apart from one, are from WD external drives from around 2008-2010.
The last one is a Samsung from around 2010.
In total 4x 3.5" 1TB drives
Then I have two 500 GB 2.5" drives from Seagate and one at 320 GB from Toshiba.
From around 2010-2012
Then a 500 GB 3.5" and a 320 GB 3.5" from an unknown company.
I have 2x 1 TB drives in one machine
Then two desktops with 1 TB each.
The 500 GB and 320 GB capacity drives are gonna be for WinXP Retro machine and Win98 respectively.
The 2.5" drives are backups and/or transfer drives, though I might add one to one of my machines if need be.
Wow, that lady is really nice..
great information for people looking to grab some cheaper drives, i have a few of these lol
Definitely a fantastic method! With minimal downsides too! This is a great option for those looking to mine chia coin!
@@RMDTech Did you see Roman (Der8auer) did a video on Chia with a breakdown of how it works
Heres what you don't know about shucking... One is that the rpms are not 7200 but rather 5900
Hi, maybe I missed it, but did you tell Seagate that you were recording, ask permission, and say it maybe broadcast?
why?
Is this still true? Shocking!
Dont ask, but what is cheaper)
she wants to tell you to save you time without risking her work.
With the speed of USB 3, and the fact that I use software RAID, I've found using the external drives as-is works well too. I have two USB 3 hubs, one plugged into each of the two USB 3 ports on my desktop. I keep my main storage, on one hub, the backup drives are on the second hub. When I want to backup each week, I just hit some switches to turn on the backup drives, run the backup program, then turn them off when done. I have multiple pairs of drives, which I treat as volumes, with files from different time periods. So the externals make it easy for me to swap out to find what I need.
The biggest thing I don't like about the external drives is the power-down cycle. For internal drives, I can specify power-down after 2 hours of non-use, or whatever I choose. The external drives are often preset, non-user-changeable; with some drives having a ridiculously low 15-minute power-down time. I despise frequent powerdown. I have had two laptop drives fail after just a couple years, both of them had 1800-2100 hours of on time, but over 5000 spinups, according to SMART. I really don't think drives are designed to handle that many frequent starts.
i use my drives for por... porche photos
Do you listen to Lazerhawk, the redline album?
By the way I use hard drives to store roms AND I MEAN LOTS OF ROMS
How many ROMs? 🤔
@@RMDTech I could say the entire nintendo collection but I do think I am missing a few I have about every game from every Nintendo console and playstation I'm still getting the playstation 2 games to this day cause there are so many
I jist want a massive HDD for my game library. Im getting annoyed at running out of space but i dont want to put a hole in my wallet either
🤔 Cheaply , for one person is like a mortgage for 40 years for another .
1tb is a lot for me
Don't shuck drives, it heavily pollutes. Just buy a drive.
The drives used in externals are designed for an enclosure and are more prone to damage and the environmental temps than a drive designed and built for internal pc. Though the external drive may seem just as good as the internal drive, the external drive outside the case will be more at risk of damage when removed than a built for internal use
totally false...
My thoughts on this is the Internal Hard Drives are more expensive because these are going to be used by IT people or people who know waht they are doing.
External is just connect and your away, even very simple for people like me. 😉😉😉
That woman is straight up lying for the company so people don't chuck. Generation difference barracuda hasn't made a new drive since 2018 XD XD what bs is she spitting she knows there is no difference there are lists of online forums telling what drives comes inside a external one so that you get the one you want at the rpm and cache you want
external drive are cheaply made drive it's nothing new
Wow
Seagate is junk
Just so you know boss, you aren't allowed to record calls without the other end knowing... you also didn't get permission from her to be in your video..
Call recording is legal in the UK. And it pretty much depends on the other party to pursue a civil (not criminal) case.
America's laws don't apply elsewhere champ.
@@1centimetre I am in the UK 'champ' and it is not legal to record and distribute recordings of calls without permission.
You can record them for personal use but distributing them to a third party.. i.e posting them online, without the other party's permission is not legal.
Maybe read up on a subject before commenting next time ey.
Simple supply and demand, likely from PS4 and Xbox and Apple owners where adding an internal is not easy for end user
Good contant mate 🫡👏