[jjeaff]

I think those in external USB drives are the most likely to fail. It seems that they put their lower quality stuff or at least drives that didn't quite pass qc into those because they know the huge majority of those will have some data out on them and then never touched again.

[wil421]

If you rip them apart they are the same as their laptop drives with dragster. Same with WD, I ripped out a green drive. Users in forums have recommended buying certain external drives and ripping them apart to save money. Certain high capacity WD red drives cost less when they were bundled into an “NAS” enclosure.

[wil421]

>If you rip them apart they are the same as their laptop drives with dragster.

Dragster should be seagate. Weird autocorrect.

If you rip them apart they are the same as their laptop drives with seagate.

[jjeaff]

How do you know? As I said in my comment, they may be drives that didn't quite meet the qc threshold.

All drives usually ship with a certain number of bad sectors. An excessively high number of bad sectors can mean there are quality issues with that specific drive. They may be 'binning' those more poorly testing drives for the external USB drives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning

[beatgammit]

I always wonder if they bin those USB drives differently than the ones sold for internal laptop/desktop use.

[jjeaff]

Yes, that is what I was getting at. I almost exclusively "shuck" my drives like that for my server. But I have gotten a seemingly high number of failures over the years.