Shucking a WD elements external drive for Synology

cyber69

cyber69

cyber69

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WD elements 12TB drives are £200 cheaper than the red counterpart so wondering if they can be shucked for use in a Synology NAS? Can the drives be fitted without any modification?
 
Don't remember doing any modifications to install mine in a microserver.

I think the modifications are only required if you wish to use another drive in the enclosure.

Have a look on youtube for some guides, there's literally thousands on there.
 
Easiest way is to buy 12TB D10 Xbox expansion drives, they're a little more than the 14TB essentials but they can be shucked without losing warranty, dont need the power pin mod and contain a higher quality Ultrastar DC HC520 drive.
 
Minstadave said:
Easiest way is to buy 12TB D10 Xbox expansion drives, they're a little more than the 14TB essentials but they can be shucked without losing warranty, dont need the power pin mod and contain a higher quality Ultrastar DC HC520 drive.
Click to expand...

Sounds like a better option with it being an enterprise drive so better reliability. Do you know how long the warranty is?
 
I did four 10TB Elements a year ago. No problems other than the power pin mod which was resolved, albeit a bit fiddly, with some electrical tape.

Waiting for the 14TBs to drop to a decent price at the moment to replace this batch...
 
Minstadave said:
Easiest way is to buy 12TB D10 Xbox expansion drives, they're a little more than the 14TB essentials but they can be shucked without losing warranty, dont need the power pin mod and contain a higher quality Ultrastar DC HC520 drive.
Click to expand...
Any idea what's in the 5TB version? Four of those would give me a nice RAID10 but I can't find a 5TB drive in WD's portfolio.
 
cyber69 said:
WD elements 12TB drives are £200 cheaper than the red counterpart so wondering if they can be shucked for use in a Synology NAS? Can the drives be fitted without any modification?
Click to expand...

please note..
nothing to say you will receive a red drive in the caddy, it is genuinely luck of the draw.


Some times in rare cases the drives have an extra pin on the power plug and you need to cover the pin with some tape.
you know you have this extra pin if you plug the drive in and it wont power on.


Snapshot said:
Any idea what's in the 5TB version? Four of those would give me a nice RAID10 but I can't find a 5TB drive in WD's portfolio.
Click to expand...
its just luck of the draw, it could be anything.
 
Minstadave said:
Easiest way is to buy 12TB D10 Xbox expansion drives, they're a little more than the 14TB essentials but they can be shucked without losing warranty, dont need the power pin mod and contain a higher quality Ultrastar DC HC520 drive.
Click to expand...

£280 vs £170. I managed to pick up 2 of the wd 14tb drives for £340 so £60 more got me 16TB more storage
 
Minstadave said:
The D10 12TB regularly drops to about £210. Its still a bit more for a smler drive but you get to keep the warranty and its likely a higher quality, faster drive.
Click to expand...

Speed isn't a huge issue for me as I have a 240 gb ssd cache drive and I've ordered a second to raid it in case it was to fail so I'll have a backup. They are 5400rpm drives so yeah not the fastest but not a huge issue for me.

Warranty wise you put it back into the enclosure if there is an issue and make sure you preclear the disk before using it for storage.

Once a drive starts to show multiple failures or its been several years then it's best to replace before it dies or in my case have a parity drive so long as 2 drives don't fail at the same time I can rebuild the array without losing data.

Its cost vs risk vs size.

To me a 14TB drive for £170 hit a point that its worth the risk vs the other options which were all considerably more expensive.

I'm hoping by the time one of them dies I should be able to get a 14TB drive for sub £100 or possibly even there are options out there in terms of cloud storage and broadband speeds which makes buying storage drives obsolete.
 
Please sing out in this thread when they are compelling "shuck" deals on offer.

I'm getting to the point though were I'm considering throwing everything into cloud storage, I fast Virgin broadband and it's becoming more compelling than throwing extra cash at NASs etc. I will probably always run a NAS for "critical" stuff but lots of what I carry I could just re-download if the worse happened!
 
HEADRAT said:
Please sing out in this thread when they are compelling "shuck" deals on offer.

I'm getting to the point though were I'm considering throwing everything into cloud storage, I fast Virgin broadband and it's becoming more compelling than throwing extra cash at NASs etc. I will probably always run a NAS for "critical" stuff but lots of what I carry I could just re-download if the worse happened!
Click to expand...

There's a 12TB deal on at the moment.
 
Just seen STEB16000402 Seagate Expansion Desktop, 16 TB, External Hard Drive HDD for £251, not sure it's a good "shucker" or not.

Apparently contains Seagate ST16000NM001G Exos Enterprise (X16) 16TB SATA Hard Drive w/ 7200RPM 6Gb/s 256MB Cache (512e) which retails at approx £480.

Not a massive reduction though, only 6% under normal price :(
 
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I saw some 12TB D10 on offer and bought a couple.

It says 7200rpm on these though but seen videos to show they are 5400rpm. Anyone confirm this?
 
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