external vs internal and prices?

[Slade2]

Ok, what gives? can someone help explain this for me?

You can get external 8TB drives for around the £200 mark. The cheapest 8TB drive currently on the overclocks web site is the seagate skyhawk drive at £242.

My question is why are there cheaper external drives available that you can buy the internal drives for? I understand that the external ones are for `archive` but if I`m honest that is exactly what I want them for to wright once and read many because they will be for storage for my media center.

I realize its not a massive saving but if you look at the next drive up in the range its £270, with some of the externals when on offer being around £180 I cant see why they should be £90 more? what is to stop me buying a couple of externals and taking the drives out and putting them in my machine? or am I just being a cheap skate?

 

[Maundie]

I would imagine you void the warranty on any you remove but loads of people do it, if your willing to take the gamble against failure I'd say do it.

 

[NeverWinter]

Once you take the drive out the enclosure your warranty is void. As Maundie has said, if you're willing to take the failure risk to save the cash - go for it.

 

[seagate_surfer]

A couple of thoughts we would like to share:

As already mentioned, the process of buying an external, taking the internal drive out of it, and using the drive inside as an internal (a process known as shucking) tends to void warranty. We won't tell you what to do with hardware you purchase, just something to keep in mind.

As far as the different drives go, in your use case I would not go for the SkyHawk line. Your stated use case is write once, read frequently, and the firmware on these drives is designed for use in surveillance environments, which is the exact opposite as your needs, they're designed to constantly be writing so as to handle recording large blocks of highly detailed video data and not drop frames. They aren't designed for reading often or for reading fast.

The reasons you may be seeing external units branded as 8TB storage capacity for cheaper than 8TB internal drives can rely on a lot of different factors. Part of it is the price-per-TB sweet point concept, which is that, based on current infrastructure, technology, and market demand, there is a storage capacity where the price per TB of storage is at it's best because that's where it is the most cost-effective for manufacturers, and the further away from that norm you deviate, the higher you're paying per TB of data in a single drive. The current sweet spot seems to be right about 4TB.

In addition to this, not all externals with an 8TB capacity are actually a single 8TB drive inside, there are some that are actually a pair of 4TB drives inside, which can influence the price of the unit.

Another consideration is that, when you get into single drives that have a large capacity like 8 or 10TB, these drives are usually geared towards a more enterprising environment, and can often be much more robust quality drives than what you'd see on the inside of those external units, like having faster spindle speed or have other robust considerations (longer warranty, etc), the details of which depend on the specific drives and what it was engineered to do. Just looking around OcUK online, there are drives such as the Seagate Nearline 8TB (ST8000AS0002) which shows at the time of this post for £194.99. Another possible solution would be going with a pair of 4TB's instead, the Seagate BarraCuda 4TB shows for £109.99 each. There's various options, you'd just have to play around a little and find what is the best fit for your needs.

We hope this info is helpful! Good luck with your search, regardless of which drive(s) you decide to go with in the end!

 

[rIcK]

I ran some 8TB Seagate ST8000AS0002 for a while, they were internal 'Archive' drives based on SMR, they were slow and nasty for writes and average for reads.

I recently replaced with some 10TB Seagate IronWolf which have been superb but cost around £300. If it makes any different I have been pulling drives out of external caddies and using as internal drives for years, weigh up the cost and see if you can afford voiding the warranty. Typically you will often find exactly the same drives in them, just surrounded by plastic. and a USB adapter.

 

[GWANGY]

AS STATED , some external drives come in cases which the drives are designed to be user serviceable, eg you wont void your warranty if you remove the drive. Backblaze, for a while, seemed to go shucking mad, during the biblical flood , followed by the biblical starvation (of drives).
Always remember your upgrade path as even if its cheaper to get 2x4tb , in the long run 1x8tb can be cheaper, as the drive is viable for longer. IMHO.