These days I would probably go with Server Parts Deals for my disks. Right now you can get a 20TB manufacturer renewed drive for $225! Plus if comes with a warranty.
Can’t believe I forgot to mention these guys!! I even bought 4 drives from them this summer for the Jupiter Broadcasting summer server project and they’re performing really nicely.
@@Cam.Klingon i had a 18TB WD Elements (Easystore but in europe) which died on me and i had a horrible RMA experience with WD. They sent me 2 dead drives that had already been used/refurbished in packaging with no bubblewrap, just the bare external drive that was barely fitting in the packaging.
I used to shuck these drives, but then I decided it wasn't worth it because one of the drives I had bought was clearly tampered with. Someone bought it before me, shucked it, replaced it with an inferior drive, returned it, and then BB sold it to me as new. I feigned ignorance (e.g. I knew exactly what happened, but I didn't want to be accused myself of having pulled this scam), and just returned it and said it didn't work (all true). Since then, if you wait until sales, the WD Pros are within $50-$75 of these shuckable prices (e.g. Can get a Red Pro 20TB for $319 right now). To me, price difference is not worth the difference. And I'm not having to deal with kapton tape. However, I still see the appeal of shucking. Enjoy!
this scam is also super common with name brand power tools at retail stores and from what I've read online they aren't as nice as BB was to you. I prefer online stores, including BBs, and haven't had any issues with fraudlent product as store returns seem to stay in-store generally.
@@wilder7516 In this particular case, it didn't even turn on. There were scratch marks near where the tabs were, and parts did not line up at the holes correctly, so I knew it wasn't the original drive should have been there. However, if it had turned on, I would first ran CrystalDisk info with it to verify the drive itself and then I would have run it through PreClear on on unRAID (while a fan points at the enclosures) for a few days. I didn't get that far with this drive.
Shucked two of these 20TB last week and put them into an old Mediasonic raid USB enclosure. These are very very loud drives that sound more like floppy drives. The 5 10TB red pros sitting next to them are very quiet in comparison. Was going to use these in a backup NAS behind the couch, but after hearing them I'll be using them for cold storage.
if i had a bunch of drives in lets say the 1tb, and a couple in the 4-8tb that i know have bad sectors or issues, and used your script would it mark the bad ones so at least some of the drive could be used?
If a drive already has failing sectors you should NOT use it for anything remotely important. Drives will stop using bad sectors automatically but the failure will likely spread over time. BadBlocks is just a test program that checks if a drive is in failure state. A failing drive can die in 5 minutes or 5 years. No program or person can tell you when
@@bjangles8718 yup 100% behind that. but i thought it'd be nice to have a couple of temp drives to move large folders here or there in my external caddies, nothing that would be critical or problematic if lost or corrupted aside from my time. at the moment they are basically paper weights but if i could mark the bad sectors i might get a little use out of them instead of ewaste. one can only make so many dreamcatchers from platters.
By removing the drive from the plastic casing, you have voided any warranty that WD may have honored. WD does keep track of the serial numbers of these external drives.
I did this once and it might make sense depending on the delta between bare and enclosed drive however the drives in these enclosures are usually slower 5400rpm drives these days. Another option might be to get recertified drives, these are usually almost brand new as well and are much cheaper than retail box ones.
@@ktzsystems do they report as 7200 or are they actually 7200? I have some shucked WD "7200" RPM drives that I put in a zpool vdev with some actual 7200 NAS drives (from several vendors and ages). a "zpool iostat -lv " shows that the shucked drives are soooooo much slower than the non-shucked drives that I very much doubt the shucked drives are really 7200
I buy refurbished/recertified drives, run badblocks on them a few times (takes a few days) and if they don't throw any errors put them into use. No worries about 5400 rpm drives or having to tape over pins or anything and come with a 2yr warranty. Also no e-waste and a quick look shows 20TB's are about the same price as the sale price for that unit. I do keep a few spares because HD's are HD's and if you have enough of them some will fail eventually.
I shucked a couple of 8TB WD drives and re-used the shells for smaller drives. Of course WD makes that as difficult as possible; you have to flash new firmware onto the USB-SATA module and you'll probably need to take a carving knife to the hard rubber corner wedges unless the drive you're putting in the shell matches the one which came out exactly in form factor, but it works and saves throwing it out.
have checked prices at the 20TB point, and for me at least its not worth it to SHUCK. as at the lowest price-point its around 390 euro and for 80 bucks less I can get a Seagate exos 20TB drive.
White label = not a group they market. What's really under the hood seems to be whatever surplus disks WD had laying around but there are plenty of threads on reddit if you want to go into a rabbit hole, they generally seem to be red-ish. Whatever they are, they have been the most reliable drives I've ever owned. I've been shucking since they were reds (they switched to white labesl around 2017 or 18 for me) and have only had 1 fail over the years which is really impressive since I beat my equpiment (they don't go a week without hitting 52-58C a few times).
My Synology tells me that it's not recommended to put these in a RAID, but running as BASIC seems to have no issues (i.e. individual disks). If you put in a PC, you have to disconnect one pin in order for it to boot in a PC enclosure. Or just simply put a SATA power line to Molex adapter and back to SATA line. That accomplishes the same thing and lets you put it in a PC case.
I shucked one early on only to find the Easystore enclosure isn't half bad. Good ventilation with rubber mounts for shock/insulation. Drives in the 8tb range ran warm, but seemed ok in the 40C range. However. My 18tb I had left enclosed. Turns out it was running 63C in there. These enclosures need active cooling if you're going to leave them spun up, imo.
I am following your tutorial now, I had to pause it a few times since you type so fast! I did have a question, I'm doing an 18TB drive and after I started it I was googling it and it says badblocks doesn't really work for 16TB+ drives. You are using it on a 20TB so what gives? It hasn't thrown an error so far yet, but it's only 48 hours in and its still reading the first write back. Will it get to the end and trip an error?
Well I went through all this and then inserted the drives into unraid, (first time I setup unraid) and then realized they had their own mechanism to do this same type of function... I regret wasting a week doing badblocks when I could have just skipped right to doing Unraid's Preclear system.
He saves some money and then we all pay the total bill 🌍 It is important to avoid wasting resources. The manufacturer is responsible, as are all those who prioritise saving a little money over avoiding waste.
And additionally if everybody is running all day long burn-in for several days, that’s a little bit of electrical power wasted but it adds up if everybody does it.
If you could even fathom the power the cloud is consuming so we can all sit here and watch the staggering amount of content being hosted live on trillions of spinning drives you might think twice about trying to criticize the few watts someone consumed doing a burn in... Toss the crypto industry on top of that, and the AI 🙄 but yes, drive shucking will kill us all. Blame WD for charging more for bare drives. It's simple economics. If external drives cost a little more, as they should, no one on the planet would shuck. They are using it to dump surplus stock
the warranty will not bring back your data. these are recertified drives where smart data is reset. just get them directly from your favorite server parts reseller your burnin test will simply reduce the MTBF to half. have fun torturing tech.
Given the _rather unhelpful_ changes WD made to their 2,5" external lines about a decade ago (The drive controller has a native USB interface, making it a useless shuck if you want a SATA unit) I'm surprised to see their 3,5" drives still have SATA interfaces on them. That change was the main reason for why I stopped buying new WD products in the first place! Nice to see they're still SATA inside of course, but the _new_ problem for me would have to be that _Made in the Era of En💩ification_ UKCA mark. Ever since that started appearing on goods product quality and reliability seems to have taken a _massive_ downturn, so I now avoid stuff with that mark on if I can. 👍 Seeing the drive has a platter assembly that takes up the entirety of its height (What does it pack? 8, maybe even 10 platters?) I wonder if we might see the FH form factor making a comeback? If you can cram 40TB into a HH drive, just imagine the 60TB potential of an FH unit! 😁
These days I would probably go with Server Parts Deals for my disks. Right now you can get a 20TB manufacturer renewed drive for $225! Plus if comes with a warranty.
Can’t believe I forgot to mention these guys!! I even bought 4 drives from them this summer for the Jupiter Broadcasting summer server project and they’re performing really nicely.
So jealous of the prices you guys get there in the US!
you can order them and have them sent to a service to ship to wherever you are in the world.
@@Cam.Klingon you can, but then there is import taxes and you are probably gonna have problems RMAing the drive when it dies, so not worth it.
@@MH-kc5jr possibly, not sure about everyone else, but I've had excellent luck with modern hard drives.
@@Cam.Klingon i had a 18TB WD Elements (Easystore but in europe) which died on me and i had a horrible RMA experience with WD.
They sent me 2 dead drives that had already been used/refurbished in packaging with no bubblewrap, just the bare external drive that was barely fitting in the packaging.
@@MH-kc5jr sounds with an issue with Easystore
I used to shuck these drives, but then I decided it wasn't worth it because one of the drives I had bought was clearly tampered with. Someone bought it before me, shucked it, replaced it with an inferior drive, returned it, and then BB sold it to me as new. I feigned ignorance (e.g. I knew exactly what happened, but I didn't want to be accused myself of having pulled this scam), and just returned it and said it didn't work (all true). Since then, if you wait until sales, the WD Pros are within $50-$75 of these shuckable prices (e.g. Can get a Red Pro 20TB for $319 right now). To me, price difference is not worth the difference. And I'm not having to deal with kapton tape. However, I still see the appeal of shucking. Enjoy!
this scam is also super common with name brand power tools at retail stores and from what I've read online they aren't as nice as BB was to you. I prefer online stores, including BBs, and haven't had any issues with fraudlent product as store returns seem to stay in-store generally.
How did you know it was inferior drive? Did it has less storage or was it slower? How did you check?
@@wilder7516 In this particular case, it didn't even turn on. There were scratch marks near where the tabs were, and parts did not line up at the holes correctly, so I knew it wasn't the original drive should have been there. However, if it had turned on, I would first ran CrystalDisk info with it to verify the drive itself and then I would have run it through PreClear on on unRAID (while a fan points at the enclosures) for a few days. I didn't get that far with this drive.
Shucked two of these 20TB last week and put them into an old Mediasonic raid USB enclosure. These are very very loud drives that sound more like floppy drives. The 5 10TB red pros sitting next to them are very quiet in comparison. Was going to use these in a backup NAS behind the couch, but after hearing them I'll be using them for cold storage.
Did Seagate modify the SATA port of their Hard Drive a few years to make it shuck-proof?
I wish I would have seen this deal. $250 for 20TB. You can't beat that.
if i had a bunch of drives in lets say the 1tb, and a couple in the 4-8tb that i know have bad sectors or issues, and used your script would it mark the bad ones so at least some of the drive could be used?
If a drive already has failing sectors you should NOT use it for anything remotely important. Drives will stop using bad sectors automatically but the failure will likely spread over time. BadBlocks is just a test program that checks if a drive is in failure state. A failing drive can die in 5 minutes or 5 years. No program or person can tell you when
@@bjangles8718 yup 100% behind that. but i thought it'd be nice to have a couple of temp drives to move large folders here or there in my external caddies, nothing that would be critical or problematic if lost or corrupted aside from my time. at the moment they are basically paper weights but if i could mark the bad sectors i might get a little use out of them instead of ewaste. one can only make so many dreamcatchers from platters.
nice but wish is the conector? standard sata? server? micro usb? i try to do the same with a 2tb disc and has direct micro usb conector
By removing the drive from the plastic casing, you have voided any warranty that WD may have honored. WD does keep track of the serial numbers of these external drives.
2:37
Porcupine Tree! I actually met Steven Wilson after a concert of his years back. It was an awesome show!
I did this once and it might make sense depending on the delta between bare and enclosed drive however the drives in these enclosures are usually slower 5400rpm drives these days. Another option might be to get recertified drives, these are usually almost brand new as well and are much cheaper than retail box ones.
These are 7200rpm
@@ktzsystems do they report as 7200 or are they actually 7200? I have some shucked WD "7200" RPM drives that I put in a zpool vdev with some actual 7200 NAS drives (from several vendors and ages). a "zpool iostat -lv " shows that the shucked drives are soooooo much slower than the non-shucked drives that I very much doubt the shucked drives are really 7200
I buy refurbished/recertified drives, run badblocks on them a few times (takes a few days) and if they don't throw any errors put them into use. No worries about 5400 rpm drives or having to tape over pins or anything and come with a 2yr warranty. Also no e-waste and a quick look shows 20TB's are about the same price as the sale price for that unit. I do keep a few spares because HD's are HD's and if you have enough of them some will fail eventually.
It is completely crazy that external HDDs are far, far cheaper than an internal HDD, even at exactly the same size and spec.
I shucked a couple of 8TB WD drives and re-used the shells for smaller drives. Of course WD makes that as difficult as possible; you have to flash new firmware onto the USB-SATA module and you'll probably need to take a carving knife to the hard rubber corner wedges unless the drive you're putting in the shell matches the one which came out exactly in form factor, but it works and saves throwing it out.
have checked prices at the 20TB point, and for me at least its not worth it to SHUCK. as at the lowest price-point its around 390 euro and for 80 bucks less I can get a Seagate exos 20TB drive.
What the shuck is going on here?!
I so bought one of these before and put it in my Synology NAS. These are great when they're on sale. Absolutely.
What type of drive is it? NAS drive? I know that WD has a color for each drive group, do you know what group this drive is?
White label = not a group they market. What's really under the hood seems to be whatever surplus disks WD had laying around but there are plenty of threads on reddit if you want to go into a rabbit hole, they generally seem to be red-ish.
Whatever they are, they have been the most reliable drives I've ever owned. I've been shucking since they were reds (they switched to white labesl around 2017 or 18 for me) and have only had 1 fail over the years which is really impressive since I beat my equpiment (they don't go a week without hitting 52-58C a few times).
My Synology tells me that it's not recommended to put these in a RAID, but running as BASIC seems to have no issues (i.e. individual disks). If you put in a PC, you have to disconnect one pin in order for it to boot in a PC enclosure. Or just simply put a SATA power line to Molex adapter and back to SATA line. That accomplishes the same thing and lets you put it in a PC case.
The sweet spot this year is definitely the 20TB easystore. The 14tb easystore for example was $199 last year but it's $240 this year.
I shucked one early on only to find the Easystore enclosure isn't half bad. Good ventilation with rubber mounts for shock/insulation. Drives in the 8tb range ran warm, but seemed ok in the 40C range.
However.
My 18tb I had left enclosed. Turns out it was running 63C in there.
These enclosures need active cooling if you're going to leave them spun up, imo.
Refurb with 2-year warranty is around $220 on eBay.
I bought a few disks from serverpartsdeals this year and have had no issues
Guess it depends on the system that you're using and how much storage you need, for if you should shuck or not.
How do you mean? Could you give an example? It wouldn't make a lot of sense to shuck an ssd but bigger drives like that it still works.
Hi Alex 👋 what are you using to show the Hostname in cool art?
Figurine - I made a video about it a while back
LOL that same external drive costs about $500,- around here so no can do xD But it's a good idea if you can get it with such a discount!
Only a month to go before we see a “is it a good idea to shuck in 2025?” Am I right Alex? 😂
Can we put some screws in that server rack? Your killing me smalls
You should test the drive before shucking it totally
A couple of days running those tests using it as a usb drive will help you
I did this with 8TB Easystores many years ago, back when the drives inside were actual, red-label WD Red drives.
Thank you
Nice shirt!
I am following your tutorial now, I had to pause it a few times since you type so fast! I did have a question, I'm doing an 18TB drive and after I started it I was googling it and it says badblocks doesn't really work for 16TB+ drives. You are using it on a 20TB so what gives? It hasn't thrown an error so far yet, but it's only 48 hours in and its still reading the first write back. Will it get to the end and trip an error?
Well I went through all this and then inserted the drives into unraid, (first time I setup unraid) and then realized they had their own mechanism to do this same type of function... I regret wasting a week doing badblocks when I could have just skipped right to doing Unraid's Preclear system.
love the video man! hope one day my channel can be as big as yours
Congrats on promoting e-waste. Your planet thanks you, hero!
🌎
He saves some money and then we all pay the total bill 🌍
It is important to avoid wasting resources.
The manufacturer is responsible, as are all those who prioritise saving a little money over avoiding waste.
And additionally if everybody is running all day long burn-in for several days, that’s a little bit of electrical power wasted but it adds up if everybody does it.
If you could even fathom the power the cloud is consuming so we can all sit here and watch the staggering amount of content being hosted live on trillions of spinning drives you might think twice about trying to criticize the few watts someone consumed doing a burn in... Toss the crypto industry on top of that, and the AI 🙄 but yes, drive shucking will kill us all. Blame WD for charging more for bare drives. It's simple economics. If external drives cost a little more, as they should, no one on the planet would shuck. They are using it to dump surplus stock
the warranty will not bring back your data. these are recertified drives where smart data is reset. just get them directly from your favorite server parts reseller your burnin test will simply reduce the MTBF to half. have fun torturing tech.
Correct!
Given the _rather unhelpful_ changes WD made to their 2,5" external lines about a decade ago (The drive controller has a native USB interface, making it a useless shuck if you want a SATA unit) I'm surprised to see their 3,5" drives still have SATA interfaces on them. That change was the main reason for why I stopped buying new WD products in the first place!
Nice to see they're still SATA inside of course, but the _new_ problem for me would have to be that _Made in the Era of En💩ification_ UKCA mark. Ever since that started appearing on goods product quality and reliability seems to have taken a _massive_ downturn, so I now avoid stuff with that mark on if I can. 👍
Seeing the drive has a platter assembly that takes up the entirety of its height (What does it pack? 8, maybe even 10 platters?) I wonder if we might see the FH form factor making a comeback? If you can cram 40TB into a HH drive, just imagine the 60TB potential of an FH unit! 😁
I know lots of folks with multi-continent disaster recovery sites. 😬❤🤣
its easier and just as cheap to buy the damn drive bare. Keep wasting your time pal.
Yes!