Hello All,

 

I have a question, that I saw more here, but couldn't find a conclusive answer.

Here in Holland, the 8TB external HDD's are cheaper than the cheapest 8TB 3.5" internal disks.

So is it possible, and foremost, recommendable to order some 8TB external disks and remove their (original) cage, and put them in a 3.5" slot in my tower?

 

Maybe a little question for you hardened unRAID guys, but for me it is a big unknown...

Thanks for the support.

 

Kind Greetings,

Rik

9 minutes ago, rikdegraaff said:

So is it possible, and foremost, recommendable to order some 8TB external disks and remove their (original) cage, and put them in a 3.5" slot in my tower?

Many of us do this as external drives are much cheaper than their internal counterparts. 

 

All of the seven 8TB hard drives I have in my two servers have been shucked from external enclosures.  There are lots of YouTube videos on how to do this quickly and without damage to the enclosure.

Okay, so shucking and adding them to the existing array is completely safe.

I hope so, because external drives are indeed cheaper than buying the internal drives of the same capacity.

In some cases, you’ll also have to tape off pin 3 of a shucked drive, check if it shows up in your BIOS after reboot, if not you’ll probably need to do it. In fact if that’s needed you can tape off the first three pins, as pin 1 & 2 aren’t used. 
 

Had to do that myself with a 10TB WD Elements disc recently which contained a HGST Helium disc, labelled as a white label WD RED. Saved me about 95€ compared to a WD RED back in February. 

Is this worth shucking?

A external HDD (Seagate Expansion Desktop (v2) 8TB) for 159.99 euros?

Here in the Netherlands a internal 3.5 inch disk with the same capacity is at it's cheapest 179.99...

 

And is the drive in the Seagate Expansion Desktop (v2) 8TB reliable??

Is it even possible to determine what drive is in it, or do the manufacturers put different drives in their external HDD's?

 

Thanks and greetings,

Rik

35 minutes ago, rikdegraaff said:

Is it even possible to determine what drive is in it, or do the manufacturers put different drives in their external HDD's?

Often there are Reddit threads which track the actual hard drive models inside various external enclosures.

 

All of my shucked drives are Western Digital and they contained WD Red NAS drives (until two years ago) or WD White drives which many claim are just relabeled Red drives.  I see no difference in their performance characteristics but unRAID lists them as HGST Ultrastar Helium drives.

 

I have no idea what model may be in the Seagate enclosures.

 

I have never had to tape the pins since the drive cages they are in are powered by Molex connectors so I do not have to worry about the 3.3v reset issue.

 

Shucking often will save you a lot of money but you have to decide at what price point it is worth it for you.  I always get the WD externals during big sales which occur frequently, so, I am usually saving $60 to $100 per drive over the internal equivalent.

I have no idea what model may be in the Seagate enclosures.

Usually the Barracuda Compute SMR, ST8000DM004 for the 8TB, other sizes usually use disks from the same family, SMR disk are usually fine with Unraid, but these Seagates do have a low workload, for whatever that's worth, not even enough for a monthly parity check. 

 

 

 

3 hours ago, Hoopster said:

Often there are Reddit threads which track the actual hard drive models inside various external enclosures.

Do you have a link to such a thread.
I think it is on the sub r/DataHoarder, ins't it?

 

edit: Thanks for the wise words, @johnnie.black.

I see on reddit too the SMR disks are not very suitable for NAS-usage...

Edited April 24, 20206 yr by rikdegraaff
See: edit

13 minutes ago, rikdegraaff said:

Do you have a link to such a thread.
I think it is on the sub r/DataHoarder, ins't it?

Yes, it would be on r/DataHoarder.  Sorry I don't know the exact link.  I just remember coming across it a while ago.  It may be linked somewhere in these forums.

22 hours ago, Hoopster said:

Yes, it would be on r/DataHoarder.  Sorry I don't know the exact link.  I just remember coming across it a while ago.  It may be linked somewhere in these forums.

I will be looking there.

Thanks for pointing me on that @Hoopster!

On 4/24/2020 at 9:53 PM, rikdegraaff said:

I see on reddit too the SMR disks are not very suitable for NAS-usage...

Most people think of a NAS as some kind of RAID array. Unraid, isn't RAID so many of the restrictions don't apply. SMR disks are fine in Unraid. If you're still dubious just use them as data disks and use conventional disks, such as Ironwolfs for parity.