I started this new thread to document some of the findings with these shuckable mybook drives.
Did not want to continue polluting the Great Deals topic I have for them there
First look
Untill I'm done with the burn-in, there's not much to post here yet, so here's a picture of how they arrived:
One thing I noticed that these come with a UK power plug on the adaptor and a piece to switch it to a EU power plug. (those silly brits)
I am not going to go into details on how to open the enclosure.
Just watch this tutorial on youtube.
Instead of cards, I used a miniture screw driver set and a pocket knife, worked much better.
I managed to pry the enclosure open and only break 1 tab.
Closer look
This is what I found when I opened the enclosure:
On the bottom of the hard drive, you can find the pcb used to provide power and usb3 connection:
Enclosure chipset
Please note that the picture above shows the pcb on another drive I had lying around.
I had already taken the 8TB drive out, and plugged the pcb into another drive.
(I had an old 1TB drive lying around I wanted to put in the enclosure).
When I tried to connect it with the new drive, I could not initialize the drive in Windows.
After some research online it turns out the pcb has a chip to restrict which drives it will allow.
If you look closely at the above picture, you can see this chip is marked as U2.
The chip has 8 headers that connect to the PCB, if you cut header 7 and 8, the pcb will accept any drive you want.
I carefully cut these connections and sure enough it worked, but there seems to be 1 big downside:
the drive no longer spins down after you disconnect it in Windows.
I tried about 6 different drives including a WD Red, Green, Blue and some Samsungs and HGSTs, and they all just kept going.
Power Issues
Some people reported having to tape off one of the sata power pins to get these to work in their systems.
I tried these in a few different whitebox systems as well as a Supermicro SC846, and experienced no issues whatsoever.
Extra Info
Some handy links:
Finally got around to uploading my WD my book shucking guide. Hope it helps you guys in getting some cheap white label reds (256mb cache)! : DataHoarder
8TB WD MyBook shucking results : DataHoarder
Conclusion
All in all I am pretty happy with the 8TB drives, they are 5400rpm but perform really well!
Even while still in the USB3 enclosure, I got around 200MB/sec.
The drives I replaced them with in the enclosure later on, only did around 135MB/sec (they are far older).
I'll add some benchmark screenshots later on.
Important: as msg7086 mentioned earlier, you should really schuck these drives over your couch or bed or something soft, as the inner cage comes flying out as soon as you push it out.
I was glad I followed his advice and avoided landing my drive on the floor, it shot out when I pried open the clips.
Did not want to continue polluting the Great Deals topic I have for them there
First look
Untill I'm done with the burn-in, there's not much to post here yet, so here's a picture of how they arrived:
One thing I noticed that these come with a UK power plug on the adaptor and a piece to switch it to a EU power plug. (those silly brits)
I am not going to go into details on how to open the enclosure.
Just watch this tutorial on youtube.
Instead of cards, I used a miniture screw driver set and a pocket knife, worked much better.
I managed to pry the enclosure open and only break 1 tab.
Closer look
This is what I found when I opened the enclosure:
On the bottom of the hard drive, you can find the pcb used to provide power and usb3 connection:
Enclosure chipset
Please note that the picture above shows the pcb on another drive I had lying around.
I had already taken the 8TB drive out, and plugged the pcb into another drive.
(I had an old 1TB drive lying around I wanted to put in the enclosure).
When I tried to connect it with the new drive, I could not initialize the drive in Windows.
After some research online it turns out the pcb has a chip to restrict which drives it will allow.
If you look closely at the above picture, you can see this chip is marked as U2.
The chip has 8 headers that connect to the PCB, if you cut header 7 and 8, the pcb will accept any drive you want.
I carefully cut these connections and sure enough it worked, but there seems to be 1 big downside:
the drive no longer spins down after you disconnect it in Windows.
I tried about 6 different drives including a WD Red, Green, Blue and some Samsungs and HGSTs, and they all just kept going.
Power Issues
Some people reported having to tape off one of the sata power pins to get these to work in their systems.
I tried these in a few different whitebox systems as well as a Supermicro SC846, and experienced no issues whatsoever.
Extra Info
Some handy links:
Finally got around to uploading my WD my book shucking guide. Hope it helps you guys in getting some cheap white label reds (256mb cache)! : DataHoarder
8TB WD MyBook shucking results : DataHoarder
Conclusion
All in all I am pretty happy with the 8TB drives, they are 5400rpm but perform really well!
Even while still in the USB3 enclosure, I got around 200MB/sec.
The drives I replaced them with in the enclosure later on, only did around 135MB/sec (they are far older).
I'll add some benchmark screenshots later on.
Important: as msg7086 mentioned earlier, you should really schuck these drives over your couch or bed or something soft, as the inner cage comes flying out as soon as you push it out.
I was glad I followed his advice and avoided landing my drive on the floor, it shot out when I pried open the clips.
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