Let’s destroy something beautiful by ripping apart an external hard drive to harvest and reuse its juicy innards.
Welcome to Esk Computers, I’m Scott and today on the desk of Esk, I’m trying to save a bit of money by shucking an unused external drive to avoid having to buy a usuriously priced new one.
I’m pulling together a build, and so of course I need storage space. As you’ve probably noticed storage prices, both for solid-state and hard drives, have strapped themselves to the same rocket-like trajectory of all computer components, so I need to reuse what I already have where possible. New internal 3TB drives seem to be going for about £150 these days, which seems like terrible value to me and a new normal my wallet and I simply cannot accept.
As such, my eyes fell on this 3TB Seagate External hard drive and as it happens, mixing a smaller nvme drive for the operating system with a larger hard drive for bulk storage is an older meta, sir, but it checks out. We’ll just need to use some form of alchemy to transform this into an internal hard drive by the mystical ancient arts of ripping it apart, or shucking, as its called for reasons unknown. So, quite literally, let’s get cracking.
In absolute terms, removing it isn’t all that difficult, because hammers exist. If you want the process to be somewhat non-destructive and reversible, well, that’s a different matter.
What’s useful about this drive is that the interface electronics live in this easily removable docking station part, so let’s, er, remove that. I think you could buy upgraded firewire or thunderbolt docks, rather than the USB2 hub I have.
I’ll give this a once over looking for any obvious screws holding this together – there are none, because life’s never that easy.
Next step is to look for any obvious seams or joins, and it’s not abundantly clear but it looks like there’s two halves joining at this halfwayish point running round three sides, so time to get prying. Worst case we could probably go at it with a dremel, but still hoping to get this out relatively non destructively
As it turns out, this is not too difficult to get into. With the benefit of future knowledge, there are three clips down the long sides that came undone fairly easily by using a largeish flat headed screwdriver in a twisting motion to lever them apart. The noise as they unclip is a bit worrying, but they haven’t been damaged by the ordeal.
Where I’ve went a bit wrong here is enthusiastically opening it up like a book, which has done the two clips on the short end no favours. As you see here they have broken, and are small enough that gluing them back together is likely to be a pain. Ah well, I’m sure between what remains of them and the rest of the clips they will still hold it together if this ever needs to house another drive.
The drive itself is just friction fit in the case with these rubberised shock mounts, so it pretty much just lifts out with a bit of effort.
The rubber parts can then be popped off simply enough, it feels like they were glued on but aren’t too sticky by this point.
Next, the screws they were mounted to, and that also secure this shielding simply unscrew with a standard Phillips head screwdriver.
I assume this is some sort of RF shielding, and it simply slides off once the screws have been removed.
And, well, there we go, a perfectly standard SATA hard drive ready for reuse. It’s a Seagate Barracuda XT, with a 3 terabyte capacity obviously, and it’s running at 7200 rpm. The date code means that it was made in December 2010. Time flies, as I did not remember this being anything like that old. I suppose we need to check that out a bit further.
Unfortunately I’ve just discovered my usual docking station is broken, so I’ll use the docking station that came with it to show you it still works. Plugging it in has it popping up and accessible in Explorer with no problems, so it’s survived its de-shelling ordeal fine.
Still, the question is should we store data on a drive that’s nearly old enough to vote? And how much life is left in it?
We can poke a bit further with the excellent and free Crystal Disk Info, which exposes all the drive’s SMART data. We’re getting a caution warning, with one uncorrectable sector found. However, it’s only had 3429 hours of up time, across 89 power cycles, which is a fairly low level of usage, particularly for its age.
We can use the also excellent and also free Crystal Disk Mark to see how it is performing, and it’s getting 35MB/s read speeds, and 30MB/s write speeds, which seemed pretty low, as it should be at least three times that.
It was at this point I remembered that the dock was only USB 2, so connecting to a USB 3 one that came with another drive gets us about 110 MB/s reads and writes, which is much closer to what I expected, although as with all hard drives, it’s awful for small random reads and writes.
The caution status means, well, I’ll need to be cautious with it. I’m not going to trust my only copy of any data on this drive, but we’re kind of backed into a corner with the current price situation. And I suppose it’s better to get all the use we can out of it, rather than just have it continue to gather dust.
I’d be a bit iffy about selling this as part of a build and, if I ever did, its condition would need to be clearly disclosed. As I said at the top of this piece, I’ve got something in the works that will use it, so I’ll give it a thorough workout there and see how it behaves before making any final decisions.
Until then, if you have any questions or want further details please leave a comment down below, and if you enjoyed this videotronic missive then consider subscribing. Until next time, take care of yourself, and each other.