Which external 2.5 inch usb drives contain actual SATA drives? – Super User.
Opening the M9T in USB enclosure and getting the ST2000LM003 out of it:
The same holds for opening the STDR2000100 and STEA2000400:
- M9T in USB enclosure: http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Backup-Portable-External-STDR2000100/dp/B00FRHTSK4
- M9T bare drive: http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Momentus-SpinPoint-ST2000LM003-Notebook/dp/B00I8O6OQ4
Opening the 15mm? high 4TB drive enclosure:
The drive is a STDA4000100
Before this gets It got deleted:
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I know many of the modern external USB 2.5 inch drives do not contain a SATA drive inside, for instance see this YouTube video about disassembling a 2TB Western Digital My Passport drive. However some drives still contain SATA drives, for instance this YouTube disassembly video of the 1.5TB SeaGate GoFlex drive which contains a 1.5TB SeaGate FreePlay drive that took very long to become available as SATA model. So: which other (preferably as big as possible, and 12.5mm or less high) SATA drives can be disassembled from retail USB drives? Edit The background of my question is that often the official specs will not tell what kind of connector the drive inside the casing it has. For example some specs for some 1.5TB and 2TB external 2.5inch USB drives in my answer below. I have two reasons I want to know: often the internal drives are not sold separately at at first and when they are, they are still a lot cheaper. The first reason is most important to me: I run several dual- and triple-drive machines of which the biggest one is the backup drive that I want to be as big as possible (especially since you now have 1TB SSDs that are 7 or 9mm high). The OWC 960GB Mercury Electra was the first that was somewhat affordable almost 1TB SSD, but now theM500 and the 840 EVO have taken over.
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I don’t know where all the downvotes come from. The question is pretty clear and makes perfect sense. It is unclear though why would one want to know the answer. Still, from my experience, there is no exact way of telling until you have seen the drive disassembled – in real life or on video. In most cases OEM will not provide the information that you want to get simply because it is out of scope of normal external HDD usage. By taking it apart you void the warranty and this is for the reason. The only thing that OEM is supposed to specify is the external interface on the casing. Which in our case is USB. Weather the actual disk inside the box is SATA or not is for you to find out if you are very curious, but you always pay the price by voiding the warranty. In fact you have pretty much answered your own question. If one wants to know what is inside the box, one goes and watches youtube videos and hopes that someone else has disassembled it before. I know this is not very encouraging but this is the truth.
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It comes down to manual tear down, or being lucky that somebody already did a tear down. Here are some drives that I know the internals of some 1.5TB and 2TB external 2.5inch USB drives.
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via:
- My ZFS question on G+: investigation for using a XW6600 based system with ZFS. « The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff.
- Lots of 2.5, 3.5 and 5.25 conversion brackets, cages and hot-swap bays « The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff.
