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Comment by theandrewbailey | Hacker News Reader

> Western Digital's 20TB HDDs with OptiNAND rely on the company's familiar nine-platter 7200RPM helium-filled platform that uses energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording technology (ePMR).

I was surprised when (a few months ago) I bought a few 14TB WD external drives, shucked one, and found a helium-filled drive.

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people who are home building freenas/truenas type setups with like, 16 x 14TB drives have had generally really good results for shucking WD USB3 external drives for what's inside. You occasionally need to put kapton tape over the 3.3V pin, which is easy enough for a $5 roll of tape and a precision razor knife to cut it narrow enough.

https://www.instructables.com/How-to-Fix-the-33V-Pin-Issue-i...

how do I know when I need to do that?

When the drive doesn’t show up in the bios.

When you have a power supply that's not SATA 3.3 compliant and a drive that supports it. The SATA 3.3 revision revised one of the 3.3v pins to be a power disable pin. Almost no hard drives support it so it's not really something you'll run into but consumer external drives will often be ordinarily super expensive enterprise drives in a plastic shell. Google the SKU of whatever external drive you're thinking of shucking to find out if it needs a SATA 3.3 power connector and instructions on opening it without damaging it in case you ever need to warranty the drive.

If you're using the drives with normal sata power plugs (not in an enclosure), you can also just snip the orange wire. (And maybe electrical tape over the live end). IMHO, this is easier than precision cutting and applying tape... But it doesn't work if you've got an enclosure that supplies 3.3V.

Having shucked numerous WD external drives - I can say I'm unsurprised. They have a history of putting decent off the shelf drives in their externals - once I even found a Black drive in one!

I suspect they could be units that didn't pass the QC bar to be sold standalone; shucked drives are cheaper for good reason.

That's pretty much what they are. Hard drives are binned based on the yield of each production run. Server drives get the best lots, then tier one OEMs, etc. External drives are the lowest bin before the trash bin.

I'm actually not sure that's true. I run a NAS with 12 8TB drives, and not a single one has failed over several years. Nothing in SMART log either. All "shucked" cheap WD My Books. Running raidz-2. Sure, an anecdote, but how do you even "bin" something like this? It's not like you can vary voltage or frequency or fuse out busted cores (which is how they bin the CPUs).

> how do you even "bin" something like this?

Number of bad sectors per drive?

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/4ingu0/how_man...

Backblaze used to do this on a large scale, they probably have reliability figures in their reports.

How did you peel it off the ceiling?

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