3 ms·
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
by walrus01 5y ago
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-in-White-Label-Disks-/ https://www.instructables.com/How-to-Fix-the-33V-Pin-Issue-i...
- tuananh 5y agohow do I know when I need to do that?
- semireg 5y agoWhen the drive doesn’t show up in the bios.
- MertsA 5y agoWhen 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.
- toast0 5y agoIf 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.