They're on sale again for $199. All you data hoarders with every episode of M*A*S*H on your NAS can now expand out with some shucked drives.

I'm buying two and will be shucking them. I expect to find WD White label drives, which >>the Internet<< seems to think are rebranded Red Plus or HGST Ultrastars with a firmware mod to set for 5400 RPM. I'll let you know what I find. At this capacity, I fully expect that they are helium drives. I have had one since last year that I left in the enclosure as a backup to my NAS. It has been flawless.

Best Buy Easystore 14TB for $199

Note to those who may not be shucking the drive:
The Easystore from Best Buy does not include hardware encryption the way the Elements drive enclosure does. If you really must have hardware encryption, you should get the Elements. However, most processors manufactured in the last five years already include an AES encryption engine, so having it in the device is unnecessary. In fact, it can be a bit of a liability, since a failure of the enclosure would render your data unrecoverable. If you are using PC based encryption and your system fails, you could restore to a new PC, and then the external drive would still be accessible. Therefore, using the device's encryption has way more downside than upside and should be avoided, IMO.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: sigcrazy7, November 12, 2021 04:41 PM

Yep, if you need to add more storage to your computer and/or NAS, this is a super great deal for shuckers and non-schuckers alike.

Cool. I have a few hundred 3.5" floppies I need to back up. I hope one drive is enough.

quote:

Originally posted by sigmonkey:
Cool. I have a few hundred 3.5" floppies I need to back up. I hope one drive is enough.

You'd better buy two, just in case.

Back in 2006 or 2007, I remember buying a 200GB external HD for $250 and thinking that was a great deal. Needed to be plugged into a wall socket to power it. Incredible how far technology has come and gotten cheaper at that.

Are you saying I can strip out the drive and install it in a Synology NAS Enclosure?

quote:

Originally posted by festus haggen:
Are you saying I can strip out the drive and install it in a Synology NAS Enclosure?

Yes. It’s common to do so. The drives in the enclosures are almost half the cost of buying them just as a drive. There’s many videos online showing how to open the enclosure without damaging it to get at the drive.

The story goes it used to be that WD used cheaper quality drives in these enclosures, greens or blues. To reduce warranty claims, WD switched to using NAS drives to increase durability. A few years ago, opening these up would reveal a WD Red drive. Then WD caught on and changed the label to an OEM white label, to prevent reselling the drive after shucking. The 10TB and larger drive seems to be an Ultrastar with the rotation speed limited to 5400 RPM.

The WD NAS lineup goes Red > Red Plus > Red Pro > Ultrastar. Shucking this enclosure should give you the durability of the Ultrastar, but with limited performance, but it saves you $170 each. The limited speed really doesn’t matter because you’re limited by the Ethernet speed anyway.

Outstanding! Thank you.

Dang!! As much as I'd like to get 2 of these for movie storage, I just can't justify $400+ right now. Also unjustifiable because the two 5TB RAID drives I have...one for storage and the other for backup...are only 1/2 full. And that already contains more movies and shows than I'll watch in the remainder of my lifetime...

Thanks, sigcrazy, for posting that!!! I'm sure there will be more sales in the future when I can justify the expense.

Drives showed up. Shucking was easy. I was able to remove the 14TB without damaging the enclosure by using four credit cards.

I put it in my NAS. Perhaps I was a little too eager, because I did it without first doing a stress test on the drive, but everything seems to be ok. I took the 6TB Seagate ironwolf that came out of the NAS and put it back in the EasyStore enclosure, and it works great, so now I also have an additional working 6TB external drive.

Tonight I will do the other drive. With my NAS running a Synology SHR volume, I have to replace a drive, rebuild the array, replace a drive, rebuild the array, etc, until all the drives have been replaced.

As for the voltage on a pin that must be disabled, that was not an issue with my Synology (DS921+). The drive went right in and fired up without any mods to the interface. Must be when only using an older SATA interface that the pin must be disabled, I'm guessing

Tonight I will try to take a few pictures to post here as I tear down the other enclosure.

OK just what the "shuck" are you talking about this "shucking"

^^^If you go buy a standalone 14TB NAS Red drive from WD, it will cost you around $369. However, you can buy an external 14TB drive in an enclosure, like the 14TB EasyStore from Best Buy, for $199. "Shucking" means to recovering the drive mechanism from the external enclosure. The drive mechanism in the enclosure is essentially the same as the standalone drive.

As people's computer storage needs have increased, the price of bare drives have become expensive but people have figured out that Western Digital is using the same drives for both their "bare" drives as they do for their external hard drive lines like Elements or Easystore (Best Buy only).

So as sigcrazy7 has said it's just a matter of buying an 8tb or larger Western Digital external drive and pulling the hard drive out to use with a NAS or media server or computer.

*on a side note, there are now 18 terabyte drives out now




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7mvkG-6lVA

Ok, I got the second drive out. Here's some pics I took as I went.

Here is how it comes from Best Buy:


First, take the unit and slip some cards in as far as they will go:


After the cards are inserted, gently pry on the back as pictured (My CRKT KISS knife with a Tanto style blade worked exceptionally well here. The blade acted as a wedge). Switch and do the other side. The cover will slide back a mm or two and the cards will fall out. This is ok, just slide the cover all the way off:


The guts after the cover is removed. Be careful to not let the drive fall out. One side is just laying in some slots:


Remove the drive and lay it face down. Remove the one phillips screw and remove the daughter card plugged into the SATA plug. Also remove the fiber optic light bar. It is just stuck into the rubber block on the daughter card:


Next, remove the rubber bushings and the Torx adaptors. I used a T-8, but I think it is actually a T-10:


That's it. You now have a bare drive to insert into your NAS, computer, whatever. The most difficult part of this is getting the cover back onto the enclosure, if you are going to replace the drive and reassemble the Easystore. It's not that difficult, but you have to get these little rails lined up and engaged before you fully slide the cover back on.

I pulled out two 6TB Ironwolf NAS drives from my Synology DS921+ and replaced them with these two 14TB drives (one at a time). I now have about 7.5TB more disk space. Eventually I will do this to the remaining two 6TB drives, and that will gain me another 16TB of space. I also now have two 6TB external Easystores. I'll use them for local backups, since they have somewhat slow, but reliable, NAS drives in them.

If you took the price-per-megabyte of the first IBM hard drive offered for the PC-XT, and applied that price to one of these Easystore units, each one would cost $14,680,064. So basically I’ve spent 30 million dollars on these two hard drives. But wait! Those are 1983 dollars, so multiply by 2.78, and I would need to pay $40,810,578 for each drive, before tax, if pricing was the same today as it was in 1983. Reliability and speed are magnitudes higher as well. Anybody remember how those IBM drives used to buzz and clank?

Western Digital has now announced 20TB drives to be available soon.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news...AQMXKz?ocid=msedgntp

Had to figure that this would happen once prices dropped on smaller capacities.

quote:

Originally posted by sigcrazy7:
If you took the price-per-megabyte of the first IBM hard drive offered for the PC-XT, and applied that price to one of these Easystore units, each one would cost $14,680,064. So basically I’ve spent 30 million dollars on these two hard drives. But wait! Those are 1983 dollars, so multiply by 2.78, and I would need to pay $40,810,578 for each drive, before tax, if pricing was the same today as it was in 1983. Reliability and speed are magnitudes higher as well. Anybody remember how those IBM drives used to buzz and clank?

You must be a young buck, I remember the bare 8" parallel SCSI drives we'd buy for Suns, etc. (but some PCs too) long before the PC-XT came into existence, and 14" platters (on various minicomputers) before that. Those were five figures apiece IIRC, and had capacities ranging from 6MB - 20MB. Noisy as hell and you could cook an egg on them when they were in use. Even though they were tiny by today's standards, you wanted to give them over night to initialize, and the fsck's done automatically at boot took half a day sometimes. Didn't last very long either, a couple of months, and you could expect to hear the CoD (click of death), or the high pitched squeal that signaled a head crash. Ahhhhh, memories!

Don't get me started on the joys of backing up those beauties to 1/2" reel2reel mag tapes! At least we weren't punching cards or paper tapes by that point.

Checking the BB web store, looks like the sale has expired, the 14TB Easystores are listed at $259.99, still a pretty good price. Or is this in-store only? All the BB's that were near me have closed their doors.

quote:

Originally posted by architect:
Checking the BB web store, looks like the sale has expired, the 14TB Easystores are listed at $259.99, still a pretty good price. Or is this in-store only? All the BB's that were near me have closed their doors.

I ordered mine online. I noticed yesterday that the $199 deal was gone. I'd wait until Black Friday and see if it shows up again. Best Buy churns that deal a bit.

Here's a 3.75MB RAMAC 350. You could lease the system from IBM for $3,200 per month in 1956 dollars, or $32,540 in 2021 dollars. It was better than lugging around 64,000 punch cards.

Right around 1970, give or take a year, I was the programming manager at the Western Union Data Center in Chicago.

We had a few FastRand II drums. They could shake the floor when running a data sorting program.

while I never used one, I do have a 60's era cake platter in my collection.



I really have a hard time processing and single drive with 20TB's of space. I think I might finally rip my CD collection