hey what's up everyone so today's episode what am i do some more computer stuff I show everybody how
to shuck a harddrive the process of shucking a harddrive if you guys aren't computer guys or
you basically buy a portable hard drive which is usually cheaper than the OEM drives or the ones
are designed to go into your computers or network attached storage devices and you take them out of
the case and use them in your drives and a lot of times what the manufacturers do is they'll
they'll put their high-end drives the ones that they charge usually 50 or 60 dollars more for
into these dry the external drives and they sell them for cheaper they usually come with a lower
warranty but there's still the same drive inside you know you get a premium drive for a third you
know probably thirty to forty percent off the what what the bare drive would have cost so
what I'm gonna do today is I'm actually got two w DS that I bought I actually bought these on a
recent sale I think they're 8 terabytes each for 140 and you know that a lot of places Amazon bnh
Newegg they were all selling them for the same price about $140 $145 some places charge tax some
didn't I ended up buying them from two different places because what I've learned over the years
of messing with hard drives and network-attached drives where you're mirroring data on to drives
for redundancy and for speed is that if you buy a defective drive from the same batch the second
one might become defective or they both kind of fail around the same time you risk losing
all your data so what I do is I usually buy one drive from one store and I buy the other drive
from in this store because at least that even though they're same drive the same model that
gives me some kind a little reassurance that they might have came from a different batch or
a different manufacturing day or whatever and they might not have the same defects if something goes
wrong so that's what I'm doing so I must show you how to today just how to take these drives
out of the case so looking at the these boxes they're basically what when I got them I looked
at that first thing I looked at was the serial numbers they come with their serial numbers of
the least the portable parts preying on them and they did had different serial numbers from looks
like different batches so that was a good sign one of the things I saw was the above they're
both tied lion tat Thailand I bought I've done this before with other drives and I've gotten
you know two of the same models one from China one from Thailand so that matters to about the
quality of the drives and the main reason why I picked up these so quick was that there's been a
lot of reports of different WD elements especially these a terabyte ones coming with their Reds which
is their network attached storage professional drives and most recently there's reports of them
coming with the HGST Helium brides also that's is another brand that WD bought a couple years
ago and those helium models were the enterprise mass drives designed to run 24/7 so that was
another good find that some people found so what I'm going to do is when I open these up
I'm gonna see what they have and I'm gonna go look up the numbers and see what they tell me
so these WD elements which is the WD retail version Best Buy sells these as they're easy
store brand these are probably some of the easiest to shut that I've messed with in the
recent past as far as popping it open what I do is I've got one of these iPhone openers that I
had laying around I took a old gift card and just cut into four pieces is kind of
use it as a as wedges so first what you do is just kind of use the iPhone then just pop pop
one of these edges up and then stick this in you wanna you don't want to destroy the case
because if something were to happen to this drive during the two-year warranty period you
want to be able to still put it back in to the case and send it back full warranty without you
know making an obvious that you shut it so so just get that first piece in there
find that I find the tab once you release the tab you just hold them
there and get them good the other sign this thing slides right off
it's important to use these plastic tools because you don't so where you don't squirt it up and wash
it's bad either so yeah once pop that slide this act like this careful not to drop this
thing these fries are just like any of the hard drive day breaking so got this out so it's your
regular WD white label as they call them now they've they've put just white labels on them
but the only way you're gonna find out what it is if you look at the model numbers listed here
and try and do your research online with what other people have been finding I've got both of
them taken apart as you can tell they were pretty easy to come off all these cases do they've got
two two little clips on each each side that you get the way Jen you pop that open and the rest of
it just slides off so that makes it really easy compared to some of the older WDS and Seagate's
that I've shucked first thing I noticed with both of these is that they this one was made
in the 18th in November this one was made on the 11th of November so they probably came from the
same factory just about a week apart you know the serial numbers I did a little research on these
serial numbers and what I found for the last year or two is you know you could look at that number
the WD 8 0e m AZ and then you also look at that number and that kind of tells you everybody that
I've seen look this up these are suggest these are Reds there's some people have posted photos
of Reds side by side with these they've got the same the same markings kind of case out here so
that suggests they're also red the one thing that I have been reading that might suggest these are
HGS teaser that there's this number right here that someone said that's they find on the HGST
site and then also there's an RN number right here that says us 7s al zero a zero that might
suggest that this is also off of the SGH st but everything else physically that i researched and
looked at suggests that these are Reds so WD red so one other way you could run you could
take these out and run them on a some utilities plug them up to your Windows machine or unit or
Linux machine and run some utilities to see what data you could extract from them and then what
firmware they're running but I'm not gonna do that I'm gonna probably just take these apart
and put them in my network attached storage and just end up using them I pretty confident they're
Reds so nothing I've seen on the Internet has suggested otherwise all right here's the back
side of the drive it do you guys want to take a look at it I didn't really see anybody post
the backsides of their Reds but I'm assuming they they're probably the same so the next thing we're
gonna do is take this thing out of the case so one things you want to do is just remove all
these little fiber optic things for the indicator lights for this drive it's the easiest way to do
it is you could leave this board on here for now but you'll see the the rubber cushions
all around just kind of push them through just kind of push the whole drive through the rubber
careful not to break some of these these tabs they're holding the rubber in but uh you just
pop it kind cuz that case is pretty flimsy so just get the that over there slide it right out
all right out and then after that just unscrew the you've got two screws the one right here
holding the USB bracket on unscrew that and then the bottom piece holding the board on right here
pop that right out and the rest of this thinker you just I just wiggle this right out pops right
out so that's how it is pretty easy to shut these drives so if you guys like what you saw leave any
comments any questions any suggestions whatever you want good or bad if you like what you watched
on this video just go ahead and subscribe to your channel always posting you know nerdy
stuff would computer things that do and car stuff that I also do so thanks for watching