External Hard Drive Question
 

I have a Seagate Expansion hard disk which is 3TB in size but the port which uses the USB3.0 cable has become very slack so im looking to remove the drive and just use it as an Internal, the problem is last time i did this on a Samsung 6TB it required the controller card inside to read the file system or i would have lost all my data.

Can u tell me if this is this is the case on an Expansion 3TB?

Thanks

Re: External Hard Drive Question
 

The "controller" is just a USB to SATA interface. The drive just plugs into the interface. No need to touch the drive itself, where the controller does tend to be specific to the drive.


I have removed one and they are just a standard HDD. AFAIK Something from a RAID setup is more of a problem for data access.

Re: External Hard Drive Question
 

It works with no fiddling!! Brilliant thanks guys.

Re: External Hard Drive Question
 

This is called "Shucking" and is quite a good way of getting cheapo HDD's. I got some 8TB drives for half the price of retail by buying WD Cloud drives and removing them from their cases.

Re: External Hard Drive Question
 

I may get a few more of these in time and do the same thing.

Ive always found the Seagate Hub+ drives to be reliable and great but this one the Data port just went all loose and funny on it and it wasnt covered with warrenty according to seagate as the drive was still in working order.

Re: External Hard Drive Question
 

Apart from WD reds, I have always found Seagate hdds to be the most reliable. I have many Maxtor and WD hdds die on me within two years.

Re: External Hard Drive Question
 

Ive had a WD Red Die on me within 2 years also.

Re: External Hard Drive Question
 

Same, Seagate all the way for me.

I also had a Toshiba once . . . only once :shocked:

Re: External Hard Drive Question
 

I wont touch Toshiba.

Tried to RMA a drive with them once and the Serial number of the drive couldnt be found even tho the drive was only just over a year old. Contacted support and they refused to help me at all so i couldnt do a thing except just scrap the drive.

Re: External Hard Drive Question
 

I've got a couple of WD blue drives (SATA) in the desktop for bulk data storage. One is about 7 years old (500 Gbyte), the other a couple.( 2 TByte) they run cool. Not experienced an issue ( yet )

Re: External Hard Drive Question
 

I've also had bad experiences with Toshiba drives. The failure rate on their 3TB models was obscene.

Drive failures are an inevitability though, no matter the brand. If you have data that matters to you, back it up or at least put the drives into RAID so you can tolerate a drive failure.

Re: External Hard Drive Question
 

I have atleast 2 backups of everything important to me.

Re: External Hard Drive Question
 

Hopefully not all located in the same place.

Which cloud backup service do you use?

Re: External Hard Drive Question
 

I use Google drive for my important docs and pictures etc.