What are you experiences with external USB drives? Have you shucked them and > --
digital man (rob)
Arelor wrote to Digital Man <=-
Re: To shuck or not to shuck...
By: Digital Man to All on Sun Dec 03 2023 03:14 pm
What are you experiences with external USB drives? Have you shucked them and
Main reason to extract the drive from the case is reliability
instead of performance gains, IMO.
Many cheap cases or encased drives have cheap USB controlers that
will die on you, or their USB connectors will give in, at the
worst possible time.
If you don't want the drive to be portable (so that files can be
moved from a place to another without the need of a network) and
you have a drive bay in thecomputer which is free, then
extracting the drive from the case is the obvious choice,
specially if you can extract it without damaging the case, IMO.
During Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals, I found a good deal on an external Seagate 14TB USB drive at Costco: $149. Dollars per terabyte, hard to beat that price.
The disk inside this external drive enclosure is just a standard Seagate Exos or IronWolf Pro NAS class-drive CMR hard drive (which separately, sell for more than, sometimes double, the external drive). Reportedly, this price difference is because the warranty on the bare drive is longer than when sold as part of the external drive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41JwxULVdAs
My first instinct/plan was to "shuck" the drive and install it inside my workstation (there's room and cabling and power to support it), but now I'm having second thoughts: USB 3.0 is 5Gbps while SATA 3 is 6Gbps. Is that potential 20% gain in performance something I need for this drive? Not especially. Some say that removing the drive, which usually damages the USB enclosure, may void its warranty. Others say it does not. Shucking cheaper external drives as replacement drives in a NAS (where USB isn't an option) is a fairly popular thing to do, but I'm not really sure about the advantage for workstation use. It is another box on the flower, another USB cable and port used, and its own power adapter. But what is one more in mess under and beside my desk?
What are you experiences with external USB drives? Have you shucked them and used the bare drive in SATA NAS or workstations?
What are you experiences with external USB drives?
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