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Although there are differences between enclosure models on the market, the general design of modern enclosures is almost identical.
#Wd my book external drive r using as internal drive how to
How to Shuck a Driveĭrive shucking is a really straightforward affair. Don’t go shopping for general products with similar names, go shopping for specific SKU codes/model numbers-there may be small features like cache or drive speed that are different from 8TB Red drive to 8TB Red drive. The key, when doing your research, is to be as specific as possible when searching and be sure to note identifying data about particular models. You can also, when you see external enclosures on sale, search for the name of the external enclosure and “shucking” to find additional information about the drive. The Reddit subreddit devoted to large scale home data storage, /r/DataHoarder, is a fantastic resource for drive shuckers, as the folks there are constantly searching out fresh sources of large high quality drives. That may not always be the case, however, so the best thing you can do is keep an eye on discussion forums where people routinely discuss drive shucking and take on the risk of buying new enclosures and testing them (so you don’t have to). Practically every other week the drive is on sale at Best Buy for ~$170 and contains a Western Digital Red drive. You need to do your research and pick your external enclosure carefully.Īt the moment (and throughout 2017, for that matter), the best value in drive shucking has consistently been the example we used in the previous section: the 8TB Western Digital Easystore external USB 3.0 hard drive. You might suspect, as you rightfully should, there is more to this magical task of shucking drives than simply going down to your local big box electronics store and buying up the first (or every) external enclosure you find. How to Select and Shuck an External Drive That’s like buying a whole car to get a cheap replacement engine rather than buying the engine by itself? The ecomonics are insane, but we’re not complaining. You could purchase four 8TB Western Digital Red drives for $1,160 (4 x $290), or you could buy four 8TB Western Digital EasyStore external drives on sale for $680 (4 x $170) and enjoy a savings of 58.6%. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, you want four 8TB hard drives for a home server project. That means if you keep your eye on sales, you can easily score a batch of hard drives for 50% off the retail price if you’re willing to get your hands dirty and shuck those drives out of their enclosures.
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Here’s the weird part: those external drives are sometimes less expensive than the bare version of the same drive. To deliver on the promise of reliability and performance under such conditions, many manufactures have quietly switched to using premium drives in their external enclosures to avoid premature failure. These days, however, there is a significantly increased emphasis on external drive reliability and longevity, as many of the products on the market are meant to be left on 24/7, come with backup software, and are used much more heavily than the external drives of yesterday. All you would get for your effort, cracking into a case, was a cheap and slow consumer-grade drive.
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Historically, it didn’t make sense to bother with the effort because typically manufacturers put their lowest quality drives in external enclosures to keep costs down and profits up. The process of shucking external hard drives keeps with that theme: the goal is to remove the protective plastic shell to get to the delicious high quality drive inside.īut why bother? Why strip away all the things that make the external enclosure what it is and reduce it to the bare drive? You can, after all, just buy bare drives right from the start and skip all that hassle. The original meaning of “shucking” is to remove the shuck, or outer protective layer, from food like corn and shellfish with the ultimate goal of getting to the delicious stuff inside.
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Buying cheap external hard drives, cracking them open, and getting more expensive hard drives for your effort is one of those things. Every now and then, you come across something that sounds way too good to be true, but against the odds, it actually works.