Should You Shuck Hard Drives and SSDs? Still Worth it in 2023?

[Lolight]

NASCompares talks multiple for and against.

 

But he doesn't break it down in a simple way for those who've never shucked external HDDs before.

IMO, instead of clarifying the subject he muddies it up.

 

My take:

shucking external HDDs might still be well worth the risk of potential warranty denial (opened enclosure) as long as the savings are big enough compared to buying internal retail HDDs.

But there are certain aspects that need to be considered including the brand.

Also as a rule all retail internals come with significantly longer warranty.

 

I prefer to shuck Seagate externals since it's not that hard to guess which particular drive model you will get.

All Seagate externals in sizes of 12TB and up contain the exact same NAS/Enterprise variety of Seagate HDDs also sold as retail internals - Ironwolf, Ironwolf Pro or Exos.

And there's no need to fiddle with the 3.3V pin mod as it is often the case with WD White Label drives sold as Easystore or Elements externals.

 

Edited June 20, 2023 by Lolight

[madejackson]

I've been shucking 2.5" HDD's since the beginning of my unraid days as the same internal only drives are always at a significant upcharge.

 

Recently I bought 5 TB WD Elements for under $16/TB. To my surprise they do not feature a SATA-Port anymore. The installed HDD has a Controller with USB directly.

 

Last time I bought Western Digital. From now on, it's seagate only (usually ST5000LM000).

Edited June 20, 2023 by madejackson

[Lolight]

2 hours ago, madejackson said:

Recently I bought 5 TB WD Elements for under $16/TB. To my surprise they do not feature a SATA-Port anymore. The installed HDD has a Controller with USB directly.

Yeah, forgot about those.

I'm not aware of any Seagate externals "featuring" a soldered USB connector.

Edited June 20, 2023 by Lolight

[Kilrah]

Yeah WD has been doing that for several years now. 

ST5000LM000 is nice and for a while shucking some was the cheapest / TB storage you could get, but now they've been obliterated by the large enterprise drives so they don't make sense anymore unless you really need 2.5".

[madejackson]

2 hours ago, Kilrah said:

Yeah WD has been doing that for several years now. 

Interestingly, i bought 3x Intenso 5tb last year which featured regular WD50NPZZ with SATA inside. So I was under the full impression buying a WD drive is a "safe" bet.

 

2 hours ago, Kilrah said:

ST5000LM000 is nice and for a while shucking some was the cheapest / TB storage you could get, but now they've been obliterated by the large enterprise drives so they don't make sense anymore unless you really need 2.5".

 

It isn't that much of a difference actually. cheapest 3.5" are going for $13/tb in my region, so about 20% less than cheapest 2.5". But I'd need to upgrade my parity drives and cages which could get costly fast.

 

I like to keep it 2.5" for my server as I have 2x 8x2.5" hot-swap cages and 2x5tb parity.

 

In the process of replacing the last old 2tb ones, getting to a final size of 80TB (70TB usable) until i can omit 3.5 completely and switch to an SSD-Only Solution in the next 5-10 Years (hopefully). SSD's are going for $34/tb right now. I expect them to be on par with HDD's in the next couple of years.

Edited June 20, 2023 by madejackson

[Kilrah]

6 hours ago, madejackson said:

It isn't that much of a difference actually. cheapest 3.5" are going for $13/tb in my region, so about 20% less than cheapest 2.5".

Not that much in price but you also get >3x the performance

 

Obviously if your setup is based on 2.5 then it makes sense continuing with them. 

Edited June 20, 2023 by Kilrah

[itimpi]

Was looking around and found a 24x2.5” drive cage in 5-in-3 form factor!   A bit expensive but could be of interest to those interested in large arrays of 2.5” disks (or SATA SSD in that form factor).   Did not realise you could get that many drives into such a small footprint as that is nearly 5 times the number of 3.5” drives that would fit in that space.  

[madejackson]

13 hours ago, itimpi said:

Was looking around and found a 24x2.5” drive cage in 5-in-3 form factor!   A bit expensive but could be of interest to those interested in large arrays of 2.5” disks (or SATA SSD in that form factor).   Did not realise you could get that many drives into such a small footprint as that is nearly 5 times the number of 3.5” drives that would fit in that space.  

Yeah this is insane. But this only works for 7mm drives, so for 5tb HDD's this would only be 12x2.5" (15mm). At the moment you'd still have more usable TB's with 5x22tb than 12x5tb.

 

When you go 7mm 24x8tb ssd's though

Edited June 21, 2023 by madejackson

[kri kri]

I have been shucking easystore's for a really long time now, but I have grown tired of using kephlon take to fix the 3.3v PSU issue, and I have been purchasing via serverpartdeals and I have been really happy. Plug and play, no muss no fuss. 

[madejackson]

So after recognizing that WD does not use SATA in their external HDD's, I now realized, that the 5TB WD Drives i got out from an external intenso HDD is dogshit as well. The WD50NPZZ that i took out of the intenso case has write speeds below 5MB/s after a brief amount of constant writing to it.

 

TLDR: Avoid WD / Western Digital and Intenso at all cost when shucking external 2.5" drives.

Edited July 11, 2023 by madejackson

[JorgeB]

4 minutes ago, madejackson said:

The WD50NPZZ

Those are SMR, WD and Toshiba with SMR usually perform really bad, you can get the similar Seagate, it's also SMR but in my experience performs much better.

[ChatNoir]

54 minutes ago, madejackson said:

So after recognizing that WD does not use SATA in their external HDD's

Maybe for 2.5 inch drives, for 3.5 it was OK the last time I shucked ones

[BlueBull]

On 7/11/2023 at 2:28 PM, ChatNoir said:

Maybe for 2.5 inch drives, for 3.5 it was OK the last time I shucked ones

Bit of a late reply but for anyone stumbling in here by searching on google, like me: shucked (3.5") WD My Book 8TB, 12TB, 14TB and 18TB in the last two months, all still have ordinary SATA connectors and none of them needed 3.3V pin fix. Those 18TB ones were shucked yesterday. Also shucked 12TB WD Elements about 3 months ago, same thing. The speed is also as expected, as are the temperatures, which are both comparable to some of my non-shucked drives of the same brand and sizes, all WD Red Plus or Pro. Price difference was about 20% here in Europe, 40% in case of recertified My Book drives bought from WD themselves. Still worth it in my opinion, at least in Europe, could be with American prices that it would hardly be worth it anymore

Model codes:
WD My Book 8TB: WD80EMZZ
WD My Book 12TB: WD120EDBZ
WD Elements 12TB: WD120EMFZ and WD120EDBZ
WD My Book 14TB: No model number noted down
WD My Book 18TB: WD180EDGZ
 

Edited September 20, 2023 by BlueBull