[Tepix]

Related: Looking at harddisk cost per terabyte, quite often extern drives are cheaper than internal ones.

For example right now in Germany I can get a WD 8TB USB 3.0 drive for 135€ but the cheapest internal 8TB drive costs 169€.

Any idea why? It's puzzling.

[walrus01]

It is very common these days to buy the WD 8TB, 10TB and 12TB external USB3 hard drives and remove their cases, and put them in some sort of home built file server or NAS. There's a technique to put a thin section of kapton tape on one of the SATA pins so that they will power up from ordinary PC/ATX type power supplies with regular SATA power connectors.

https://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Fix-the-33V-Pin-Issu...

In large ZFS arrays, many people are using them with great success, at no greater or lesser annual failure rate than the expensive enterprise hard drives.

[jonah-archive]

> at no greater or lesser annual failure rate than the expensive enterprise hard drives.

I've read these reports as well, but I can say that it's not my experience (we've gone through a few rounds of shucking at the Internet Archive, for economy and in one case necessity after the 2011 Thailand floods pinched the supply chain). Our raw failure rates on shucked drives are significantly higher, and the drives themselves are typically non-performant for high-throughput workloads (often being SMR disks/etc, though hopefully the move away from drive-managed SMR will finally kill that product category off).

[morsch]

I'm apparently out of the loop w.r.t. non-solid state storage. For people in the same boat:

Shingled magnetic recording (SMR) is a magnetic storage data recording technology used in hard disk drives (HDDs) to increase storage density and overall per-drive storage capacity ... The overlapping-tracks architecture may slow down the writing process since writing to one track overwrites adjacent tracks, and requires them to be rewritten as well.

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

[walrus01]

From reddit.com/r/datahoarder I don't believe I've seen a single instance of 8, 10 or 12TB consumer USB3 drives coming out of the plastic case as a model that is shingled recording. The average consumer trying to copy many dozens of GB onto an external drive would not tolerate SMR write performance.

[jonah-archive]

Some of the disks in the market over the last few years were not well-labeled in terms of revealing their SMR internals, and use larger media caches to disguise write performance issues (at least, until they don't). For example, the Seagate STGY8000400 is an external 8TB SMR drive. But the industry as a whole is moving to host-managed SMR, so hopefully that specific issue with external disks will soon go away.

[Tepix]

Could you publish some statistics?

[driverdan]

It has been like this for years. You'll often see people refer to "shucking" them, taking the drives out to use in a NAS.

[cr0sh]

My best guess would be that more people buy external drives than internal, and those that "manufacture" external drives (ie - buy internal drives and repackage them) purchase in larger volumes than those that sell bare internal drives.

Of course, that wouldn't explain the difference between a WD external drive and that same drive as an internal drive - assuming that WD actually manufactures both (and doesn't just license the name provided the 3rd party uses their drives)...

[LameRubberDucky]

I noticed this yesterday while shopping for cyber Monday deals. If you want to load up a server with drives, perhaps the external drives can be removed from their cases and used internally?

[xur17]

I did exactly this when setting up a NAS. Saved $50 / drive, and it took me a few minutes to remove the drive from each.

[JustSomeNobody]

/r/DataHoarder might be a good place to ask (or search). Also, this is known as "shucking".

[javitury]

Check it before you buy it. Years ago I bought a 1TB WD external drive. The usb interface was connected directly to the drive.

[LameRubberDucky]

Thanks! I will have to read up on shucking and and /r/DataHoarder. I would think someone already has a list of which external drives can be used this way.

[weinzierl]

For me on amazon.de the WD 8TB USB 3.0 drive is currently at EUR 159.99. Where do you get it for EUR 135?

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

https://gh.de/?cat=hdx&xf=6_8000%7E840_USB+3.0&sort=p