this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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[question] Can I use the drive inside my WD My Book in a NAS? (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Hello everyone!

As a photographer without a lot of money, my girlfriend used external drives to backup her files. A few years ago, she was able to upgrade to two 8tb WD My Book: one that she uses on a day to day basis, the other as an exact copy (thank's SuperDuper!).

But we now want to upgrade to a NAS. Since we will need a lots of storage (I was thinking four 8tb drives, so that we can have a few tb each with redundancy), I was wondering if I could use the drives inside the My Book in our NAS?

I could just open it, but I don't want to ruin her hd before we buy our NAS, and I can't find any reliable info about what's inside. I'm sure there are some reliability issue in using used hd in a NAS, I'm just curious.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yes you can and they're quite easy to take apart with a prying tool and a Philips. A guitar pick or plastic spudger works well to get it started and then use a few additional credit cards to keep the clips apart. Check out some YouTube videos on sthucking these.

You may need to tape over one of the pins on the drive depending on whether your NAS can use the 3.3V reset pin or not. A small piece of Kapton tape works well for this and you can Google photos to see which pin it is/examples of taping.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Great comment, just wanted to add two things:

  1. Shucking HDDs like this is very common
  2. The manufacturer will not warranty the drive if it is removed from the shell. If this is important to you then hang on to the shell and reassemble it to get warranty. The serial number on the HDD itself will indicate it's supported to be in a shell so there's no way around it.
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Yes. You can even use it outside, connected to the NAS via USB. 😁

  • Running a 4x8TB array over USB 3.0.