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).
Your question isn’t very clear… The product specification should say what interface the internal drive is… Almost all off-the-shelf USB hard disks nowadays are SATA… – Big ChrisMay 25 at 17:00
I think most off-the-shelf USB hard disks are USB as it is cheaper to manufacture. But the product specifications are very unclear about it. – Jeroen Wiert PluimersMay 25 at 19:13
That comment is very confusing, are you asking about the interface between the drive and controller or controller and PC? – Dan NixonMay 25 at 19:22
@DanNixon try using an @ symbol next time. it’s no use telling somebody their comment is confusing when you leave confusion as to who you are addressing. I think you were referring to Jeroen because he is asking a question, and you refer to somebody ‘asking’, though ‘chris’ replied. Nevertheless, it’s pretty obvious what Joroen meant and Chris meant the same. – barlopMay 25 at 19:50
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.
Thanks. The medium to bigger sized sites on StackExchange have turned to be pretty unforgiving. G+ communities have taken over the role of being welcoming. And after that other places will take that place. Anyway: thanks a lot for your answer. I was afraid it would come down to manual labor, and appreciate you confirm that. Thanks also for explaining the reasoning. – Jeroen Wiert PluimersMay 25 at 19:36
1
Not entirely an “unknown” because when you plug the disk in it will install a bridge (the usb-to-SATA/IDE) and will then install disk drivers. Your system device manager will then say the disk make/model. You can then search for it and it’ll say whether the disk is SATA or IDE. – Big ChrisMay 25 at 19:40
1
Just out of curiosity, why do you need an external HDD that contains a standard SATA drive? If you want to take it aparat, then this is not very cost effective. You could just buy actual SATA drive if you need one. And if you need to use it as external once in a while, buy an enclosure. Then you know for sure that your hdd is standard sized with valid SATA interface. And enclosures are damn cheap these days. – smcMay 25 at 19:41
1
up voted
Good comment, @BigChris, however your device manager will only tell you what the interface told it in the first place. And it depends on the firmware that OEM has put into it. Sometimes you can figure out SATA/IDE, sometimes not. I have a WD external HDD, and I have no way of telling what is inside it. And it is not like want to know (it just works) – smcMay 25 at 19:45
1
up voted
@sms I recall reading of a 1TB samsung external usb drive cheaper than the internal ones on the market, so that’d be one reason other than curiosity. And read his second paragraph about a usb drive where the sata version hadn’t yet come on the market – barlopMay 25 at 19:53
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.
Iomega 35213: 1.5TB Iomega® Prestige™ SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive. Specs in PDF Document don’t tell about what the drive itself uses as an interface. Internal drive actually has a SATA connector (disassembled this myself).
WDBU6Y0020BBK-EESN: WD Elements Portable Storage 2TB Black. Specs in Word Document don’t tell about what the drive itself uses as an interface. Internal drive actually has an USB connector (disassembled this myself).
WDBMWV0020BBK-EESN: WD My Passport Ultra 2TB Black. Specs in Word Document don’t tell about what the drive itself uses as an interface. Internal drive actually has an USB connector (see first YouTube video).
HDTB120EK3BA or HDTB120EK3CA: Toshiba STOR.E Basics 2TB Black. Specs on web page (can’t find PDF or Word Document) do not tell what the internal drive uses as an interface, but there is actually a SATA drive inside which is an MQ01ABB200.
HX-M201TCB/G or STSHX-M201TCB: Samsung M3 Portable 2TB Black. Specs in PDF document do not tell what the internal drive uses as an interface. Could not find a tear down video or description.
STDR2000200: Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2TB black. Specs in PDF document do not tell what the internal drive uses as an interface. But it is in fact a Seagate M9T is normally only available to OEM, andseems 9.5 mm high.
– remove the battery
– remove the wide bottom plate
– remove the three screws of the hard drive (there are 4 holes, but only 3 screws, saves half a cent per laptop)
– pull the tab gets the metal bracket with the hard drive out of the laptop.
Now you can unscrew the hard drive from the bracket, and replace it with a new one or an SSD drive.
Indeed. CUA. The days (:
I’ll write more about CUA in the future (there is some CUA site:wiert.me stuff from the past) as it defines a lot of modern UI and user experience.
In fact the history of Ctrl-C and Command-C goes back until before System 1 (the OS for the first Macintosh) which indeed had the Open Apple Key shortcuts, but didn’t introduce them.
Kijk je naar de MX200 vs Evo 850 dan krijg je bij Samsung 5 ipv 3 jaar garantie, significant betere prestaties en een software suite met onder andere secure erase, overprovisioning en 1click optimalzatie settings voor Windows.
Hi everyone. I’m a geek. Learned most of the stuff by doing, and keeping tracks of what I did on my tech-blog http://wiert.me
I want to start with ZFS on a pair of HP XW6600 machines having 32gigabyte of RAM.
Any help on that is much appreciated.
The idea is to have one of these here in a closet and the other remotely, and perform replication between them (I’ve a 50megabit fiber-to-the-home uplink which can grow to 100megabit plus, internally my network is gigabit).
My current data is on a Windows 2003 x64 server with dual RAID5 configurations that are synced every night (not optimal for various reasons) with about 12gigabyte of files having mostly read-only access patterns and these kinds of sizes:
– small files between 4kilobyte and a few megabytes
– photos between 5 and 20 megabytes
– ISO backups and 7zip archives of projects (operating system installers, etc) between 100megabytes-6gigabytes
plus an ESXi machine having about 4gigabyte of data (mostly sizes between 20 and 200 gigabyte).
New storage should initially be at least 16gigabyte with room for growth.
I’m having active experience with OpenSuSE, ESXi and Windows. Solaris experience is from a long time ago. Learning by doing is my way of quickly gaining knowledge.
My schedule is doing research until the end of January (partially overlapping with a holiday) then building and testing until the end of Q1, going live early Q2.
Current plan is to put a lot of Samsung M9T 2terabyte SATA drives (they are only 9.5millimeter high) into the XW6600 rigs.
Earlier this year I did some research on controllers and hard drives, and I wonder how much of it is still current: https://wiert.me/2014/03/12/lots-of-2-5-3-5-and-5-25-conversion-brackets-and-hot-swap-bays/
(A quick calculation shows I should be able to get at least 14 externally accessible M9T drives into this machine, plus room for internal SSDs, etc).
So: where should I get started?
Initial questions I have:
– how about rebuild time when drives are lost? (how does the process of cold/hot spares work, can this be automated, how fast is it?)
– I’m not happy about the RAID5 rebuild times, so are 2TB drives indeed the sizes to go for?
– how about configuring things like ZFS equivalents of stripe size, buffer sizes, etc?
– what SATA controllers to use (is mainboard OK, what in addition to the mainboard SATA?)
– how can ZFS be used as an iSCSI target? how well does that work? (That would be really nice to connect to it from ESXi, Windows and many Linuxes/Linii)
– what about compression and block-deduplication?
– what about ZIP and L2ARC? how to estimate their size?
– which ZFS implementation to use? ZoL? OpenSolaris? Nexenta? Others?
– can a ZFS volume grow by adding extra drives?
(14 drives would get ~20terrabyte based on Z-3: http://www.servethehome.com/raid-calculator/ or http://wintelguy.com/raidcalc.pl but I want to have room for growth)
Cool, I just found out that Wikipedia has a Screenshot topic, listing how to take screenshots (and often shots of the current window) on many platforms, where (*) means I verified them:
Apple Mac OS X
(*) Use “⌘ Cmd+⇧ Shift+3” for the screen or “⌘ Cmd+⇧ Shift+4” for a part of the screen (as of Mac OS X Tiger, you can press the “Spacebar” to capture a Window in stead of part of the screen). You can press “Ctrl” with these shortcuts to the shot goes to the clipboard, otherwise it gets saved as a PNG file.
Microsoft Windows (*) Use “Prt Sc” for the screen or “Alt+Prt Sc” for the Window
(note that on my laptop and multi-media keyboards, you need to type the “Fn” key in order to press the “Prt Sc”)
Apple iOS
(*) Press the “Home” and “Lock” button at the same time.
Google Android
Hold the “Volume down” button, then press the “Sleep/Wake” button.
(*) Or press the “Sleep/Wake” and the “Home” button at the same time.
HP WebOS
Press the “Orange/Gray Key+Sym+P” at the same time.
Or press “Home Key+Power” at the same time.
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 