External Drive Murder Porn

[AshleyAshes]

Hard drives are a weird thing.  OEM drives are sold to consumers as a 'Computer Component' and they don't see the same market forces as 'Consumer Electronics'.  Meanwhile, the exact same hard drives sold in enclosures are 'Consumer Electronics' and can face aggressive pricing.  Here I've seen the Seagate 8TB Archive drive run OEM for about $319 CAD at the lowest but prices mainly run $349-$389 CAD.  Seagate's USB enclosures I'd previously seen fall to $249 CAD at Black Friday but for Boxing Day this year it hit the rock bottom price of $199 CAD, which is about $25 CAD/TB.   This is good because my media storage server has fallen below 1TB and it's a good time to expand the FlexRAID setup.

 

Some disassembly required.

 

 

I can't deny that this feels SUPER wasteful.  A DC power brick, USB to SATA bridge, the big retail packaging, all are waste now but the savings on the HDD is just huge.

[FPSwithaWacomTablet]

Dat title though... Sounds like stuff you'd pull out of an FTP server once inside Tor...

[AlanAlan]

6 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

Hard drives are a weird thing.  OEM drives are sold to consumers as a 'Computer Component' and they don't see the same market forces as 'Consumer Electronics'.  Meanwhile, the exact same hard drives sold in enclosures are 'Consumer Electronics' and can face aggressive pricing.  Here I've seen the Seagate 8TB Archive drive run OEM for about $319 CAD at the lowest but prices mainly run $349-$389 CAD.  Seagate's USB enclosures I'd previously seen fall to $249 CAD at Black Friday but for Boxing Day this year it hit the rock bottom price of $199 CAD, which is about $25 CAD/TB.   This is good because my media storage server has fallen below 1TB and it's a good time to expand the FlexRAID setup.

 

Some disassembly required.

 

 

I can't deny that this feels SUPER wasteful.  A DC power brick, USB to SATA bridge, the big retail packaging, all are waste now but the savings on the HDD is just huge.

So basically if you buy your own hard drive and an enclosure it will be better?

[AshleyAshes]

1 minute ago, AlanAlan said:

So basically if you buy your own hard drive and an enclosure it will be better?

Well, it can often be CHEAPER.  That said, this comes with one big caveat: You can't RMA a drive that has been ripped out of an enclosure.  The serials for drives used in pre-made USB enclosures are marked, any attempt to RMA the drive ripped out of an enclosure will be denied from the get go.  In the case of these kinds of Seagate enclosures, the enclosure must be ripped apart to get the drive, you could never put the drive back in again if it breaks, they'll know you used tools to gut the one time only assembly enclosure.  So that is a risk you must acknowledge.

 

When it's $199 for 8TB, I'm going to take the risk.

[SCHISCHKA]

i did this to an external WD. inside was a WD green that had a firmware bug that would cause it to brick itself if used within windows. I gave it away to someone with the specific instruction to NOT use it in windows without upgrading the firmware. you can guess what happened

[AshleyAshes]

Awwww yeah, 30TB total in the FlexRAID pool.

[Gronnie]

Those drives are likely rejects that didn't pass testing to be used as an internal SATA drive.

[AshleyAshes]

15 hours ago, Gronnie said:

Those drives are likely rejects that didn't pass testing to be used as an internal SATA drive.

Er, yeah, that's not how external HDDs work.  They're actually a pretty popular consumer product and even during Hard Drive Shortage of 2012 companies producing externals were found to put superior, more expensive, HDD models than what should have been installed into externals in a desperate bid to keep the shelves full of products.

Any assertion that external HDDs are made from drives from 'The Reject Bin' is just ignorance.

[Gronnie]

32 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

Er, yeah, that's not how external HDDs work.  They're actually a pretty popular consumer product and even during Hard Drive Shortage of 2012 companies producing externals were found to put superior, more expensive, HDD models than what should have been installed into externals in a desperate bid to keep the shelves full of products.

Any assertion that external HDDs are made from drives from 'The Reject Bin' is just ignorance.

Oh really, ignorance eh?