I have a secret for you. Come close. Closer. Alright, that’s good. You know those external storage drives, the kind you buy to store your photos and game saves? Inside is a regular ol’ internal hard drive, one that’s more accessible than you might think, and often cheaper than buying a brand-new drive. If you’ve got a desktop, NAS system, or home media server to fix or upgrade, consider trying your hand at the art of shucking.
Yes, shucking. Shucking an external drive involves disassembling the external enclosure and harvesting the bare internal hard drive that sits within. From there, you can use it however you see fit, like putting it in your PC, home server, or NAS. The trick is disassembling the enclosure without destroying it. It’s not crucial, but if you ever have a problem with the drive itself and need to send it in for warranty, the manufacturer might wonder where the enclosure is and promptly reject your warranty claim.
The Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act of 1975 says that the manufacturer can’t void your warranty just because you disassembled your device. Instead, they have to prove that whatever malfunction occurred was because you disassembled the product. But it’s always better to be safe than sorry. With the right technique, you can convert a defective bare drive back into an external drive at any time and avoid a customer service hassle. It’s pretty easy to disassemble most external hard drives without damaging anything, especially the WD Elements series—we have a step-by-step guide that takes you through the whole process using nothing but a Jimmy and a Phillips screwdriver.
The work can be quite rewarding, too. Take this Western Digital 14TB Ultrastar internal drive on Newegg, for example. It’s the cheapest 14TB Western Digital bare drive Newegg sells, priced at $350 at the time of this writing. Compare that to a recent sale of a 14TB external drive from the same manufacturer, down to a historically low $190. That’s a cool $160 savings over the standalone bare drive, nearly a 50% discount. And even if there wasn’t a sale, the 14TB WD Easystore regularly sells for $260—still a healthy markdown. So it makes a lot of sense to look for deals among external drives, even if you’re really shopping for internal drives.
And these are no second-rate hard drives sitting inside these cheaper externals. They’re the same server-grade hard drives the manufacturer normally sells for dozens of dollars more. So why are external drives—fitted with a case, connectors, and all the assembly labor that entails—cheaper than just the bare drive?
There could be many economic and marketing reasons for it. Perhaps companies just expect technically proficient buyers of single drives can afford to pay more, while they sell a higher volume of plug-and-play external drives to the masses. One big reason, though, is manufacturing tolerances.
When companies manufacture a product at a large scale, there are variances in the quality of the finished product. Some units come out the other end picture-perfect, while others not so much. It’s a bit like baking cookies—same recipe, but some can end up too crispy, or without enough chocolate chips. The lower-quality units aren’t good enough for enterprise server farm customers, but instead of throwing them out, the manufacturer sells them in external drives, with a shorter warranty—but you and I, casually backing up photos and documents, wouldn’t notice these quality differences.
Keep in mind, not all external drives are shuckable. Laptop-size 2.5-inch drives can be a toss up, as some have their USB controller boards soldered directly to the hard drive (which is a repair and data recovery nightmare in and of itself). Western Digital, in particular, has consistently been guilty of this. But for the most part, popular 3.5-inch series like Western Digital’s Easystore and Elements, as well as Seagate’s Expansion and Backup Plus lines are easily shuckable.
Let’s also address the elephant in the room: Shucking external drives creates waste. Once you harvest the bare drive from the enclosure, all that plastic and circuitry is now useless to you. Hopefully you’re taking it to a certified recycler, or giving the components to a fellow data storage buff to reuse. You can also repurpose the power adapter for various projects, like for a Raspberry Pi or LED lights. You can also do a bit of easy circuitry magic to reuse the USB controller on any other hard drive, converting it to an emergency makeshift hard drive dock.
So the next time you need more internal storage in your PC, server, or NAS, don’t count out external drives. Count them in, shuck them, and buy yourself something nice with the savings.
37 comentários
All good points, but do your homework first. The drives in an external enclosure are not necessarily the same as an internal drive you would buy separately.
In many cases, these enclosures contain “consumer” drives, which are not rated for 24x7 operation (like WD’s Blue/Black series or Seagate’s Barracuda series). A drive rated for 24x7 operation, which you want for anything in a server or NAS device (like WD’s Red Plus and Red Pro series, or Seagate’s Barracuda Pro or Iron Wolf series) is not likely to be found in an external drive sold for consumer use.
FWIW, I recently built three external USB drives. I bought Toshiba N300 series drives, which are 7200 RPM and are rated for 24x7 operation. I did look at external drives but after narrowing the search to 7200 RPM drives with 4TB capacity, that doesn’t leave many options, and I could not find any information about supporting 24x7 operation (which probably means “no”). And most cost the same or more than what I paid for the Toshiba internal drives.
shamino - Responder
I have shucked over 40 WD drives. They are "white label” reds and HGST ultrastars. If you buy the big ones, your going to get a red or enterprise equivalent. I’ve never seen a Green, Blue, or black drive. Its very easy to tell since those three types of drives do not have TLER enabled. The white label drives do. Further by buying the large(greater than 10Tb) your also pretty much guaranteed to get a helium filled drive which will run cooler and quieter. This used to be true of the 8TBs too, but in the past year or so those are no also available as air filled. I wouldn’t buy a sub 8TB drive from western digital at this point as it could be an SMR drive, and those are no good for RAID arrays. I haven’t bought any yet, but the 16TB seagate drives have Exos enterprise drives in them according to the datahoarder subreddit. All of my drives run 24/7, in 6 years of this practice I have yet to have a drive “die” or even throw a smart error. I have no qualms about recommending them for 24/7 operation.
Tyler Watkins -
For most (desktop) consumers, shucking an external drive for internal use is a bad idea. Seriously. Most drive manufacturers put cheap drives with shorter-than-par life inside that external case, and these external drives just do what they are supposed to do — cheap, offline backup storage.
Remember for hard disks, the reliability of your data is more important than disk repairability and price. Don’t save money buying drives that’s less reliable. The only exception (that you can shuck drives and go cheap) is when you set up a RAID with self-recovery mechanisms.
宋岡哲 - Responder
If you really believe these drives are “cheap”, then why should anyone entrust their backups to them? I think there is a lot of misinformation coming from the HDD manufacturers, especially from WD. I treat everything they say with suspicion.
compos mentis -
I’ve used this method to get a few legit WD Reds out of external enclosures. Thankfully, I work at an IT department that contracts with an e-waste recycler (EPA and DoD certified for eco-friendliness and data security), so I was able to deal with the leftover electronics responsibly. I popped the disks into a home-built NAS with FreeNAS on it. I intend to get some “proper drives” if ever these die, but I’m satisfied with them for now :)
Matthew Adams - Responder
I agree with 宋岡哲. I have many cheap $140 Seagate 8TB USB drives and they are slow as !&&*. Comparable internal drives are way cheaper. My problem is managing all those external drives. I’d rather see an article on the best way to do that.
Jose Sopato - Responder
The problem you are having with the drives being slow is because they use a technology called SMR that slows down write speeds. Larger drives do not suffer this affliction. Basically the data tracks on the platters overlap slightly so to write a data track the two adjacent tracks must also be read and rewritten, so its constantly shuffling data around. This type of drive is perfect for a (Write Once Read Many) WORM scenario such as for family photos, or data that does not change frequently.
Tyler Watkins -
I could not agree more. Every time I’ve pulled open a WD external enclosure, I’ve found a nice WD Red NAS drive inside. The folks clutching pearls about “substandard hard drives” must not have looked for themselves before they started giving advice.
John Kelly - Responder
I’ve found that shucked drives are a LOT quieter in general, which is important for my home server as it has 18x drive bays. Seeing as it’s just a backup server, when a drive dies it’s not a big deal. I also use these shucked drives in the desktops in my home and each computer is backed up individually to the cloud. I’ve had failures, but not at a higher rate than the more expensive IronWolf/Red drives. I’ve got 4x IronWolf drives right now (10TB each) that are less than 3 years old and they’re starting to make horrible noises. The 10TB shucked drives I bought at the same time are still running strong. I don’t think I’ll ever buy a bare internal hard drive again. The shucked drives actually seem better and are like half the price.
sapphirescales - Responder
Some drives (from at least WDC) are NOT usable without the USB controller. A few can be easily modified, but some cannot. I’d say the 3.5” are also a toss-up.
parts - Responder
That’s not true. You can still repurpose the drives as internals, but you won’t be able to swap between internal and external environments without reformatting. That’s because some USB-SATA bridge firmware (eg WD My Book) encrypts the data, and other bridges (notably Seagate) are configured with a 4KB sector size.
compos mentis -
I find it hard to believe some of the comments. I worked in IT for 25 yrs and found nothing but slow drives inside enclosures. Some of them are specially formatted and can’t be used outside the enclosure.
dmarois - Responder
IME some enclosures are encrypted, others are configured with 4KB sector sizes, but you can always repurpose them for internal use. DVR drives, however, are often firmware locked.
compos mentis -
I pulled a Seagate external apart, and used that drive for a grand total of about a week before it died. Turns out it was their notorious ST3000DM001, which failed with a high degree of regularity, and filled the void in a lot of their external drive boxes. I currently have one left, the main drive on a computer I don’t use very often, and I’m hoping I can get everything I need off of it before it dies too.
I will pass on any Seagate products because of that drive. They apparently knew it was junk, and shipped it anyway. So over Seagate…
Sometimes the ‘deal’ you think you are getting IS too good to be true. The chances of finding a pearl among the swine inside external boxed drives is far small to make me think it safe and prudent. Unless you can verify it’s a ‘good drive’, peeling it out of the case seems hardly worth it in my experience.
RobCow - Responder
I have been shucking for years and never have had a problem. My old Mac Pro 3,1 is filled with shucked 8 and 10 Gb drives, except for the startup ssd.
The sad part is all those leftover power supplies.
filmtronics - Responder
The drives in external drives are just fine. During the hard drive shortage a few years ago, BackBlaze had to resort to drive shucking in order to continue operations and they worked just fine.
Their research has shown that the durability of these drives is virtually identical to the more expensive “24x7” rated drives.
Jeff G - Responder
Just in the past 2 weeks, I has an 11 year old MyBook external drive stop working. I shucked it and took apart the controller assembly to find that the two electrolytic capacitors has leaked and given up the ghost. I replaced these capacitors, reassembled the drive, and returned the drive to service.
Yes, an 11 year old drive probably doesn’t have much more life in it, but the data on it is backed-up to BackBlaze and if I can get a year or two more time out of it, then that is waste and expense delayed.
Jeff G - Responder
It would probably have been good to include mention of a recent development that affect the ability of drives to be repurposed to NAS or RAID arrays. That is the drive technology of SMU vs CMU. I would bet most of these new super high capacity drives in external enclosures are SMU and would show up as failed in a RAID array. From the little I have read on this, SMU drives pack more density by overlapping the adjacent tracks requiring them to read and then rewrite the data next to where new data gets written, taking extra time and steps. These operations are somehow incompatible with array controller operations that then flag the drives as failed.
Ross Heitkamp - Responder
May work for 3.5” disk enclosures. But 2.5” portable one’s WD uses a SATA headerless drives (with USB controller built in the drive electronics itself) in them, so you can’t use them for any other uses. Seagate on the other hand does use the normal SATA header drives. Recently Seagate 10TB enclosers were found to be using IronWolf disks which are actually rated for 24x365 operations.
https://forums.redflagdeals.com/best-buy...
Adarsha MV - Responder
There definitely is a difference between the SMR and CMR drives. Last year I bought a Drobo5N2 and filled it up with shucked drives. Things rocked along fine for about 14 months and one failed. Replaced it with another shucked drive. Then it started eating them.
They had started recommending CMR. All I had installed were SMR. In an external drive dock after repartition and reformat, they checked good. SMART data checked good.
I went back to my stash of old drives and filled the 5N2 up with CMR. No problems. I am now only buying CMR for the Drobo.
The Drobo let’s you mix sizes and mfg of drives, but as you make changes, it shuffles the data around a lot.
The firmware maybe monitoring how long it takes to move.
The shingling may create problems on adjacent tracks. The error correction built into a drive takes a it of time to correct errors.
Now I use the shucked drives in an external drive dock to back up the Drobo.
Dennis Womack - Responder
Good article. I have been doing this for many years. Mostly I do this so that I have a few spare HDDs handy so that when I am repairing or upgrading computers I have the replacement HDDs close at hand.
Michael Walsh - Responder
One thing I have noticed is a high failure rate of the drives installed inside of enclosures that are aimed at the Mac world. I never knew the reason why but of four external drives for Macs, three of the internal drives failed.
Michael Walsh - Responder
Also keep in mind that OEM drives are always the newest “out of the oven drives from the factory as opposed to older drives stuffed into enclosures .
More importantly is that WARRANTY is usually Much shorter on cheap EXT drives , WD black is 5 years as opposed to 1 year for the WD ELEMENTS . Worth considering .
i was expecting him to mention old DVR that nobody cares for anymore . I found many in the garbage and they usually carry 1 or 2tb SATA hard drives for FREE …
Benjamin - Responder
How do you know what drive is inside an external enclosure until you open it? It’s usually not indicated in the specs.
eric - Responder
Use a tool such as CrystalDiskInfo. Of course you have to buy the drive first …
compos mentis -
Fine article; many thanks. I remember the joy of stumbling across shucking a couple of years ago when faced with an external drive with a broken USB connector. I figured I had nothing to lose by opening the case. Low and behold, if was a WD Black. I got my data back and had a drive I could use. Some Internet search then led me to "shucking". But until i read your article, I had wondered about the cost difference between internal and external drives. Thanks!
EricNJ - Responder
Right, so they are second-rate drives in some or many cases? Plus, environmentally this is a terrible thing.
Charlie Nancarrow - Responder
Be aware that many WD drives which are marketed as “5400 RPM class”, and which actually report a speed of 5400 RPM to tools such as CrystalDiskInfo, actually spin at 7200 RPM. Also you will find that WD rebadges HGST models, so the actual drive may be a HGST helium model.
Also be careful of pin#3 on the SATA power connector. If your internal SATA power cable has +3.3V on this pin, the drive may not spin up. This is because the SATA standard now defines a Power Disable pin. The solution is to place insulating tape over this pin, or cut the 3.3V wire in the SATA cable.
compos mentis - Responder
I agree with shamino. Like Forrest said, consumer external drives are like a box of chocolates. The manufacturers can and will put different drives into them and there’s no way for a buyer to know past a reasonable doubt what actual drive will be inside a randomly-purchased consumer enclosure.
I have definitely read reports of external enclosures that contain drives that are not standard SATA as well.
Maybe Backblaze can amortize and afford the gamble and risks. Joe Consumer can’t and it’s a really BAD idea.
aad - Responder
3.5” drives are standard SATA. It’s the 2.5” drives that you need to be careful about.
compos mentis -
I just purchased a WD EasyStore 14TB from BestBuy ($189.90). It is a WD140EDFZ and appears to be a helium filled model according to DriveDx. It is running very quiet and cool (29c). DriveDx reports 1 issue from the start: 1 Mechanical Start Failure. Don’t know if that is significant or not. Running full self-test now so I await the results.
sthendrix - Responder
This hard drive has completed a full 24-hour self-test without error. BTW, this is the quietest, coolest, fastest, cheapest HDD I have ever used. If it urns out to be reliable, then what a bargain!
sthendrix -
When it comes to SSD, they are cheaper (GB/$) to buy naked than in an enclosure. I just did research on this because I bought SSDs.
Joe - Responder
I think they are not stupid, why they put a same quality drive into enclosure and sell for less? I guess it may be lower MTBF for example. If you like to live on the edge or just for disposable usage (like CCTV NVR, TV recordings) then go for it. ;)
Tomofumi - Responder
I was concerned because my WD Elements regularly ran at 110°F or more. After I saw this article I shucked the plastic case and replaced it with an aluminum job with a small fan (Rosewill RX-358) and now I hardly ever break 75°F.
Stephen Adams - Responder
The idea that lower quality drives get ‘dumped’ into enclosures and are sold for cheap to the unknowing Joe Public seems like a myth “experts” tell themselves, in order to look down upon us mere mortals.
H4ckRn00B - Responder
Can a shucked enclosure be used with an extra internal drive of a different type / capacity?
Michael Lynch - Responder