1y ago

Can you shuck a drive BOTH before & after it has been written to?

Specifically a WD Elements (22gb).

Thanks!

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I did it and was surprised it worked because people told me it wouldn't. If I'd known that, it would've saved me a lot of copying and backupping.
- Except it's not always the case. I had a few WD Elements/Easystores that I had data on, shucked them, and couldn't read them in Windows. It wasn't encrypted, just something funky done with the partitioning and couldn't use it until I destroyed existing and created new partitions.
  But it can't hurt to try it first, you should be able to throw it back in the enclosure to get access to the data, although good idea to have a backup anyhow.
- people told me it wouldn't
  It is beyond belief how misinformation gets propagated over Internet, at least here it's something more subtle, but it's really weird how people constantly come asking about 3.5" if they are shuckable at all (as in if the internal drive is "normal", not that they would want the data, they'd like to just shuck the drive from the start). What's more people even manage to gaslit themselves that somehow in the past they've had personally some 3.5" external with the USB directly on the PCB!
  
  There was the pin 3 issue.
  I shucked an 8TB WD, and it didn't work in my computer. I put it in a WD My Cloud (Wish I had gone Synology then, and not his along the way) and it's working fine.
  Maybe that issue made people hesitant?
  
  That's somehow fine, as there is a small seed of a real issue (although it's on the power supply side not on the drive side, and it's easy to understand and to contain) but to have people scaring themselves on Internet about 3.5" drives with USB directly on the PCB, even if nobody ever has seen one in the whole history of the universe, but you know just in case, like they would be appearing like some mutating viruses, and even more PEOPLE TRICKING THEMSELVES after reading all this fear mongering that "I really really feel like I've gotten one before" it's absolutely next level.
  
  There was the pin 3 issue.
  If you mean the 3.3v pin, I wouldn't classify that issue as a "was" quite yet.
  My most modern PSU is a Corsair RM850x, released June 2022 according to the shop page. Now maybe Corsair actually makes shit hardware; I'm no expert. But in any case, I have a pretty freakin new power supply that needs tape.
  So honestly, I'd say the misinformation is that the pin issue ever went away.
  I shucked an 8TB WD, and it didn't work in my computer. I put it in a WD My Cloud
  Yeah, funny enough, the DAS boxes I've used always bypass the pin issue. Or I guess I should say that they function properly.

10 comments