Using external 3.5 inch harddrive drives for NAS

[boba99999]

I am building a NAS and would want to install 3 drives (2 data, 1 redundant). Is it possible to buy 3 external 3.5 inch harddrives (ex. Seagate One Touch Hub or WD My Book), extract the drive and use them in a NAS without issue? I compared the price for them in my country and higher capacity ones are usually over 100 USD (equivalent) cheaper than an same size internal 3.5 inch HDD. Thanks.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Yea this is pretty common. Look up the term shucking. 

 

I'd just keep a eye out for SMR and its potiental issues.

[paddy-stone]

Something interesting I found out recently... apparently they don't make SMR drives above 10TB.

 

I can't remember where I saw this info, I was looking into buying some 16/18TB drives and wanted to make sure they weren't SMR. So at least that's a relief if you don't have to try a deep dive on those drives at least.

[Needfuldoer]

My home server uses shucked 12 TB WD MyBook drives. Depending on the backplane you might have to tape over a power pin so they don't misinterpret a power feed as a "shut off" command, but in the chassis I've used they've just worked.