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submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by Sunny@slrpnk.net to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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?

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[-] lnxtx@feddit.nl 27 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Be aware. Some external USB drives, like WD Elements, have built-in USB controllers. So they don't have a SATA connector.

[-] icy_mal@lemmy.world 6 points 7 months ago

I think this depends on whether it's a 3.5 or 2.5 inch drive inside. To my knowledge, all external drives with a 3.5 inch drive inside are shuckable and have a standard SATA interface. With the compact drives that have a 2.5 inch drive inside, many will have a native usb interface and no SATA connector.

It makes sense as 3.5" sata drives are used for many many applications so why make something new just for external drives? With 2.5, however there are very few devices that use spinning sata drives in this form factor. It makes a lot more sense to build the USB interface directly on the drive since their main and possibly only application is external drives.

I could be wrong, but this has been my experience.

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this post was submitted on 28 May 2024
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