Every now and then, you come across something that sounds way too good to be true, but against the odds, it actually works. Buying cheap external hard drives, cracking them open, and getting more expensive hard drives for your effort is one of those things.
What Is Shucking (and Why Bother)?
The original meaning of “shucking” is to remove the shuck, or outer protective layer, from food like corn and shellfish with the ultimate goal of getting to the delicious stuff inside. The process of shucking external hard drives keeps with that theme: the goal is to remove the protective plastic shell to get to the delicious high quality drive inside.
But why bother? Why strip away all the things that make the external enclosure what it is and reduce it to the bare drive? You can, after all, just buy bare drives right from the start and skip all that hassle.
Historically, it didn’t make sense to bother with the effort because typically manufacturers put their lowest quality drives in external enclosures to keep costs down and profits up. All you would get for your effort, cracking into a case, was a cheap and slow consumer-grade drive.
These days, however, there is a significantly increased emphasis on external drive reliability and longevity, as many of the products on the market are meant to be left on 24/7, come with backup software, and are used much more heavily than the external drives of yesterday. To deliver on the promise of reliability and performance under such conditions, many manufactures have quietly switched to using premium drives in their external enclosures to avoid premature failure.
Here’s the weird part: those external drives are sometimes less expensive than the bare version of the same drive. That means if you keep your eye on sales, you can easily score a batch of hard drives for 50% off the retail price if you’re willing to get your hands dirty and shuck those drives out of their enclosures.
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, you want four 8TB hard drives for a home server project. You could purchase four 8TB Western Digital Red drives for $1,160 (4 x $290), or you could buy four 8TB Western Digital EasyStore external drives on sale for $680 (4 x $170) and enjoy a savings of 58.6%.
That’s like buying a whole car to get a cheap replacement engine rather than buying the engine by itself? The ecomonics are insane, but we’re not complaining.
How to Select and Shuck an External Drive
You might suspect, as you rightfully should, there is more to this magical task of shucking drives than simply going down to your local big box electronics store and buying up the first (or every) external enclosure you find. You need to do your research and pick your external enclosure carefully.
Which Drives Should You Shuck?
At the moment (and throughout 2017,…
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