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?

  • slazer2au@lemmy.worldEnglish
    222·
    6 months ago

    Yes. Be aware there will be some pin blocking you need to do to make it work right because vendors know this trick.

    • stevestevesteve@lemmy.worldEnglish
      163·
      6 months ago

      I have done this with dozens of drives and have never had to do any pin blocking. You only need to do that if you’re using an absolutely ancient sata power cable that doesn’t know about the spinup pin change

        • stevestevesteve@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          6 months ago

          This has been the case since SATA revision 3.3, released Feb 2016. So while I may have exaggerated with “ancient”, a brand new PSU certainly shouldn’t still be feeding 3.3v to that pin.

        • ShepherdPieEnglish
          1·
          6 months ago

          Same here. A brand new modular Seasonic Platinum PSU (back in 2018 when I built the PC) also needed the 3v3 pin covered. I just use Kapton tape over the pin to avoid any destructive methods or having to use sketchy molex connectors.