Hiya, so am looking to buy more storage and while browsing am seeing some external harddisks, such as Western Digital My Book and Seagate Expansion Desktop for cheaper than the internal harddisks themselves. Have seen this one video from KTZ Systems where he bought up multiple of these external ones just to open them up and use the disks for his own server. Was therefore wondering if you peeps have ever done this and if there any downsides to it at all?
Personally I think it’s a bad idea
There’s lots of things that can go wrong and most of the time those drives are made in super controlled environments because they can be extremely sensitive. It’s just not worth the headache
A lot of external drives are just internal devices with another controller and casing around. I had a 4TB I used with my laptop, and tore apart the casing and just plugged it into my desktop when I built one. Unless you start hammering the external case around, the drive will be fine.
It’s completely fine and was one of the most common ways to add a cheap new drive back in places like /r/datahoarder. The WD enclosures are super easy to take apart with guitar picks and old credit cards. The USB controller just slots into the SATA port and is held in place with a single Philips screw. I’ve been running these in my server since as far back as 2018 (usually adding 1-2 every year or two) without a single issue.