I recently bought several external hard drives. After looking around on the Internet a bit I settled for Seagate Expansion Desktop (v2) drives. I had read about these drives before and according to the internet the 10TB and larger drives have very interesting drives inside. In fact, I recently bought two 10TB versions of this drive, which contained Barracuda Pro drives (ST10000DM004). These drives are rated for 24hr/day usage, and spin at 7200 rpm so they work very well in a small NAS machine I use. At the time of writing these 10TB external drives cost around €193, whereas the bare internal drive itself costs around €290. Quite the difference! This is why people love so-called ‘shucking’: removing the drives from the enclosure and using them in e.g. their home NAS or home server.
For my annual offline backups I bough a Seagate Expansion Desktop (v2) 12TB (part nr. STEB12000400). For this drive things are even better: it contains an IronWolf Pro drive (ST12000NE008). These are true server drives rated for 24×7 use in servers of up to 24 drive bays. In fact, I use 8TB and 10TB IronWolf Pro’s in servers I use for work. Here the price difference is €210 for the external drive (a nice discount in a Dutch web shop recently) vs. €360 for the internal drive.
Of course, warranty can be an issue when shucking drives. I haven’t (yet?) had the need to return one of my shucked drives. I guess I’d have to put them back into the external enclosures. This would be possible, although I didn’t manage to remove the enclosures without damaging the little clamps that kept the lid attached to the rest of the case… But at these price differences I will take the risk (at least for personal use; professionally warranty without hassle may be worth the extra cost).
Thanks for the info, I am currently looking into shucking two 12 or 14TB drives for personal backup. Having shucked WD 8TB drives recently I was looking for a cheaper alternative to their 12TB Elements and MyBooks.
Where I am located the 12TB WD cost about 2x as much as the 8TB WD, so the relatively cheap Seagate STEB12000400 just became the drive of choice!
Greetings from Germany!
My ST10000dm004 used for backups is now failing. It starts up and works ok but as soon as data is copied out then after couple of GB copied it spinsdown and doesn’t spin up afterwards. Only disconnecting power helps. All test pass but not usable as drive anymore.