Shucking large capacity hard drives from external enclosures can be a great way to get cheaper mass storage. But is the drive inside just a relabeled Enterprise or Pro disk, or is it something else? How does it perform when released from its USB prison?
I show you how to easily shuck the Elements drive without damaging the case, and how to put it back together. But I also fully test the drive inside against a 20TB Ultrastar to test exactly how they both perform in and out of the case. Is SATA or USB faster? What does the enclosure do to temperature? Find it all out in this video.
WD Elements 20TB External Hard Drive:
WD Ultrastar 20TB Enterprise Drive:
iFixit Pro kit:
IFixit Mako kit:
Cheaper simpler tool with with picks and levers:
Guitar picks, cheaper option:
0:00 Intro
1:40 Physical comparison of the disks – Elements vs Ultrastar
2:35 How to open the case easily without damaging it
5:52 Testing Methodology and objectives
6:30 Large File Write testing: Elements vs Ultrastar
9:50 Large File Read testing
10:29 Mixed File Write testing
11:27 Mixed File Read testing
12:00 Mixed File Rewrite testing
12:18 Temperature Comparisons for both Elements and Ultrastar
13:22 Conclusions while putting the drive back in the enclosure
The problem is you don’t actually know what’s in there. In years past, one could buy two of the same model and find different drives inside.
What you should have tried to test was swapping the controller boards between the Ultrastar and Elements drives and rerun the data rate test. I certain the performance difference is due to a larger RAM cache for Ultrastar drives. Whereas the USB drives have their cache reduced or eliminated to save on cost.
I have selected two of those Seagate 24TB USB drives for a friend’s backup setup. I found them to be very fast and quiet drives. But the AI crisis have made everything rather unaffordable these days.
Any Knows a way to check for new Firmeware on WD HDD , WD ckose the support 2020 for her Update tool , when i Buy HDDs i canot check for Newer Firmeware ??
other manufaktors has a tool , the new scandisk say ohn her webside ist works on REd blue and black , but bullshit az running tool ist say nothing found …
to the USB HDDs the have diffrent HDDS inside , i buy 3 and 2 of it was WD whithe label and one was hsgt
Cheers m8.
Nice but I’m not seeing much of a price difference. HDD Storage is still being hit by the same market forces as RAM and SSD.