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External hard drives

S

steelodon

Senior member
Why are external hard drives cheaper than internals right now? Can these drives be just as good when removed from the case?
 
Newegg has this Toshiba 2TB external drive right now for 59.99. With the 3 yr extended warranty that comes out to 71.99.
 
Some external drive enclosures use a nonstandard interface to the internal drive and/or some level of encryption meaning the bare drive on it's own may not be usable. Best bet is to search for any examples of people disassembling them, sometimes user reviews mention this. It's almost certain that breaking the enclosure apart voids the warranty on the drive and for some enclosures this can only be done destructively (ie no putting it back together and pretending you didn't....something to think about).

As to why they're cheaper than internal drives, I doubt we're getting something for nothing and I also doubt the manufacturers wouldn't drop the prices on the bare drives if they could. It may be the external drives are ones that failed the quality assurance needed for internal bare drives while still being functional, so I wouldn't bet that a salvaged external drive could be trusted in heavier use.

Unless the price difference is great and you know for sure you can pull the drive from the enclosure I wouldn't personally bother. You know what you're getting with an normal internal drive and have the warranty to fall back on. Much less so with external drives.
 
Probably just getting rid of inventory. I'd bet the externals aren't the top quality samples. But for $60, just make sure you have a backup, and have fun.
 
Erithan13 said:
As to why they're cheaper than internal drives, I doubt we're getting something for nothing and I also doubt the manufacturers wouldn't drop the prices on the bare drives if they could. It may be the external drives are ones that failed the quality assurance needed for internal bare drives while still being functional, so I wouldn't bet that a salvaged external drive could be trusted in heavier use.
Click to expand...

That is very often the case. Best drives go to enterprise, second best to internal and the rest is "dumped" as cheap external drives. Therefore you shouldn't trust any sort of external drive further then you can throw it... 😉
 
steelodon said:
What do you think about the wd re4 2tb from eBay?
Click to expand...

RE4 are good, sturdy hard drives as you would expect with an enterprise drive. Thing is, as such a drive, it may have been pretty heavily used. I don't think I would buy a used hard drive off eBay.
 
Such misinformation...

External drives are more popular, therefore they cost less. It has nothing to do with quality.
 
Phynaz said:
External drives are more popular, therefore they cost less.
Click to expand...
And they are less popular for the other 10-11 months out of a year...why, exactly? Do people give them as gifts, now (and if so, why didn't I get any for Christmas? I could use extras! 😀)? They tend to be occasionally cheaper, but are usually more expensive.
 
Phynaz said:
Such misinformation...

External drives are more popular, therefore they cost less. It has nothing to do with quality.
Click to expand...

Ehh, think that you're wrong there. The warranty on external drives is the shortest out of all the drives that the mfg's offer.


Edit: If your theory was true, then GTX970 video cards should be cheap as chips.
 
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