To shuck or not to shuck?

[Bluntwrapped]

Hey guys, so I’m in the final stages of piecing together my Unraid build and I need to buy some storage drives.

The cost of external vs internal storage is around 50% less at the cheapest.

I’m looking at the WD 12TB Elements external, one of the many HGST 12TB variants or a Seagate EXOS.

I would like to start off with two drives. One as storage and another for parity. I can always add more later as I need the extra storage.

Would you guys:

Buy two cheaper external elements drives and shuck them.

Or

Buy one elements external and another retail/OEM with longer warranty.

Or

Forget the elements drives altogether and buy two retail/OEM drives with a 5 year warranty.

For the cost of two retail/OEM drives I could buy 3 WD Elements externals.

Any thoughts?

 

[FreeStream]

Upgraded a few months ago to shucked 10TB elements.

Would do again. It’s easy to get them out just have to watch for the SATA pin 3(?) thing where the drives don’t spin up. Bit of electrical tape and all is good.

I’ll be grabbing some more at BF hopefully.

Keep the bits so you can send it all back as one if a drive fails. I also ran three preclear cycles with them in the cases to ensure they were OK.

 

[iamtheoneneo]

Drives are drives.
Shuck.

 

[Avalon]

Should you do something many people have been doing for decades without significant issue and saved a small fortune? Up to you. Do you enjoy burning money for the sake of it? If so I can point you to a number of deserving charity’s...

 

[Journey]

Just populated a Synology DS3617xs 12-bay NAS with 12x 12TB WD Elements drives (all shucked), I had one faulty drive which I put back in the plastic enclosure and have had a replacement which was fine. Ended up allowing for more redundancy on the same budget and more drive space over all, was just over £2,000 vs. £4300 for the same size drives as OEM, or £2,900 for smaller drives.