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I know I can shuck my hard drive, but it has data on. Can I just take it out of it's enclosure and connect via sata and all will be well?
Shuck hard drive
- Thread starter Helen Barber
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Depends on which model external you have, there's a possibility it could have hardware encryption in the USB SATA bridge. If it does you'd have to copy the data to another drive, reformat after shucking, then copy the data back.
Caporegime
Some WD drives don't let you do this. There's some kind of encryption or similar meaning you can't read any data from them when removed from the enclosure.
Iirc with the last WD drive I shucked, you had to do something with the header pins.
Caporegime
Yeah that's separate issue regarding power.
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Mine is a
WD 16 TB Elements Desktop External Hard Drive
Plug and play?
WD 16 TB Elements Desktop External Hard Drive
Plug and play?
You can shuck that but you have to cover the first 3 or just the 3rd sata pin with kapton tape to make it work on a pc.
Electrical tape will do
Yeap, worked fine on my main PC. However I think it is depends on what PSU you have, the drive worked without tape on another system.
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I find kapton tape better, electrical tape tends to come off when you remove the power connector and it leaves behind a sticky residue.
True. Mine don't get moved often
Yep depends on your psu configuration
I prefer kapton tape as electrical tape is thicc and less prone to breaking the sata connector if you change drives a lot.
Good to know. which width in mm do you go for?
I usually use 0.066mm or 2.6mil. The ones that can survive 300+C temperatures as the normal ones tend to shrink when heated.
Oh wait. you meant width, i use 5mm
.I had about 10 external drives all at different sizes and made by different brands - WD Element/My Passport/My Book, Samsung One Touch etc.
Whenever i get a new external, i diskpart it as i don't need the bloatware which comes with it.. specifically the encryption or backup utilities.
Luckily all WD drives worked out the box when i attached them to my DAS.. none needed the SATA pin sealed. (i guess WD partitions as GPT by default)
All the Samsung drives use Seagate internal disks... i assume Samsung bought out Seagate.. unfortunately after cleaning them, i don't check what partitions are created and so 5 of mine were using MBR... meaning i had to use the external enclosure adapters to pull data off it, clean the drive and repartition as GPT before they would work without the adapters. Any drive configured as MBR won't work, as i get prompted to format the drive upon plugging in. Changing the connection to an adapter let me access it straight away.
I know there are utilities out there where you can repartition drives without data loss.. but none which are open source and i don't want to pay.
Whenever i get a new external, i diskpart it as i don't need the bloatware which comes with it.. specifically the encryption or backup utilities.
Luckily all WD drives worked out the box when i attached them to my DAS.. none needed the SATA pin sealed. (i guess WD partitions as GPT by default)
All the Samsung drives use Seagate internal disks... i assume Samsung bought out Seagate.. unfortunately after cleaning them, i don't check what partitions are created and so 5 of mine were using MBR... meaning i had to use the external enclosure adapters to pull data off it, clean the drive and repartition as GPT before they would work without the adapters. Any drive configured as MBR won't work, as i get prompted to format the drive upon plugging in. Changing the connection to an adapter let me access it straight away.
I know there are utilities out there where you can repartition drives without data loss.. but none which are open source and i don't want to pay.
Or using Molex to SATA adapter for power.
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WD are a pain in the ar** for this, they are the only one i know of that screw around like this, even the drives in my WD MyBook Duo are useless outside of the box, and this is one that's specifically designed for users to swap drives in, never had an issue with Seagates in this regard.
2.5" drives are a different matter as they sometimes have propitiatory connection methods for the sata/usb bridge, sometimes with it being hard soldered to the drive circuit board
2.5" drives are a different matter as they sometimes have propitiatory connection methods for the sata/usb bridge, sometimes with it being hard soldered to the drive circuit board