Shucking a WD elements external drive for Synology

cyber69 · 8 Jul 2020 at 09:00

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?

Semple · 8 Jul 2020 at 09:07

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.

Minstadave · 8 Jul 2020 at 09:07

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.

cyber69 · 8 Jul 2020 at 09:16

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.

Sounds like a better option with it being an enterprise drive so better reliability. Do you know how long the warranty is?

Minstadave · 8 Jul 2020 at 09:24

cyber69 said:
Sounds like a better option with it being an enterprise drive so better reliability. Do you know how long the warranty is?

Not sure if the drives have official warranty support or not but the enclosure and drive has a 3 year warranty.

FreeStream · 8 Jul 2020 at 11:29

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...

Snapshot · 9 Jul 2020 at 08:23

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.

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.

MaXxBoulton · 9 Jul 2020 at 18:34

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?

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.

its just luck of the draw, it could be anything.

Psycho Sonny · 11 Jul 2020 at 23:00

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.

£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 · 11 Jul 2020 at 23:12

Psycho Sonny said:
£280 vs £170. I managed to pick up 2 of the wd 14tb drives for £340 so £60 more got me 16TB more storage

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.

Psycho Sonny · 11 Jul 2020 at 23:40

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.

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.

HEADRAT · 14 Jul 2020 at 09:07

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!

Minstadave · 14 Jul 2020 at 10:06

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!

There's a 12TB deal on at the moment.

HEADRAT · 14 Jul 2020 at 10:10

Minstadave said:
There's a 12TB deal on at the moment.

Yeah I did see that one, thanks for post though

HEADRAT · 23 Nov 2020 at 09:17

HEADRAT said:
Please sing out in this thread when they are compelling "shuck" deals on offer.

Anybody seen any fantastic Black Friday shucking bargains out there?

Minstadave · 23 Nov 2020 at 09:19

Nothing yet.

HEADRAT · 23 Nov 2020 at 09:24

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

HEADRAT · 24 Nov 2020 at 17:31

Update, just seen STEL8000200 Seagate 8 TB Backup Plus Hub USB 3.0 Desktop 3.5 Inch External Hard Drive for £79 but can't really find any details of what drive is inside

shaf · 26 Nov 2020 at 07:38

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?

Minstadave · 26 Nov 2020 at 07:48

shaf said:
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?

Theyre 7200rpm. I've shucked two recently.

This is the drive they contain:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...Vaw0WHYqCdNCcXC9LOztvLmkg&cshid=1606376946143