Amazon has the WD 18TB Elements drive for $299US - Can it be shucked?
I know WD has been clamping down on shucking capabilities lately, by requiring the drives to use their proprietary USB interface - more so on the MyBooks, but I don't know bout the Elements series.
Is this worth getting to shuck? And what model drive is usually inside?
Thanks!
-- DS
Not sure what model drive is usually inside the 18tb elements but I got a WDCWD180EDGZ-11B2DA0 with mine. It reports as 7200rpm.
Not sure what you mean with then clamping down on shucking, I have only ever bought Elements and there has not been any changes in the last 3 years at least. With shucked hdds it will always be a sata drive inside with a sata to usb adapter. With ssds this will differ.
Finally, the $299 price is quite poor. For that price it would be cheaper to buy new.
What you know is completely false. There is no known 3.5" external that isn't a completely "normal" 3.5" internal drive inside. Yes, I'm aware of multiple times when some (usually Mac) users came with the idea that they need WD software to format their drives but that is only because they just can't find the buttons to partition/format a drive.
Completely False? No known 3.5 external that isn't normal inside?
You sure about that?
What about these drives that have a USB interface instead of SATA.
And what's the SPECIFIC example you want to mention, can you find even a single one or are you just trolling for clicks?
I don't know if they still do this, but MyBook used to use encryption on their interface, preventing use of the drives outside the enclosure. Not an issue if you're planning to format the drive outside the enclosure.
AFAIK, this is still true for 2.5" portables, which also have the USB interface integrated into the mainboard.
I don't know if they still do this, but MyBook* used to use encryption on their interface, preventing use of the drives outside the enclosure. Not an issue if you're planning to format the drive outside the enclosure.
That didn't prevent you from USING the disk, but it would just prevent you from using the encrypted data via the enclosure - without the enclosure. The disks themselves were perfectly normal, even regularly branded (green or even red) at the time.
There's some that need a SATA pin bypassed to be used internally. It's not too much of a pain but it is something.
No, it is less than nothing, it is a FEATURE of internal drives, that can be used ONLY internally, if the drive has the feature it can do MORE internally. Now of course if one has a power supply that isn't wired accordingly to SAT3.3 (2016) standard this "more" thing is telling the drive (again, in a standard way, it'll happen the same if one buys just any internal with this feature) to turn off.
This doesn't answer your question, but check out the 18TB drives that can be had refurbished from Serverpartdeals.com. You can save a lot of money and buy extra drives for more capacity or on-hand replacements considering the savings.
Best Buy has 18TB WD easy store for $199. I got 4 total for shucking.
Best Buy has 18TB WD easy store for $199. I got 4 total for shucking.