how to get my 8 TB bare drive out of the WD 8 TB USB external drive

I just figured out how to get my 8 TB bare drive out of the WD 8 TB USB
external drive to work in a pc as a backup drive. The drive was
formatted exFAT which hung the file server pc boot for some reason. I
put the USB daughter board back on the bare drive and hooked it up to my
office pc. It came right up. I reformatted it NTFS with 4 KB sectors. I
removed the USB daughter board and put the bare drive back into the file
server pc. The file server pc came right up and the drive was D:. Life
is good and I saved $80 by buying the WD USB external 8 TB drive instead
of the bare drive.

https://www.amazon.com/Book-Desktop-...dp/B01LQQHLGC/
and

https://tinkertry.com/liberate-weste...re-to-save-big

Lynn

On Tue, 22 Aug 2017 20:44:49 -0500, Lynn McGuire
wrote:

I just figured out how to get my 8 TB bare drive out of the WD 8 TB USB
external drive to work in a pc as a backup drive. The drive was
formatted exFAT which hung the file server pc boot for some reason. I
put the USB daughter board back on the bare drive and hooked it up to my
office pc. It came right up. I reformatted it NTFS with 4 KB sectors. I
removed the USB daughter board and put the bare drive back into the file
server pc. The file server pc came right up and the drive was D:. Life
is good and I saved $80 by buying the WD USB external 8 TB drive instead
of the bare drive.

https://www.amazon.com/Book-Desktop-...dp/B01LQQHLGC/
and

https://tinkertry.com/liberate-weste...re-to-save-big

I wish I needed more drives! Less than $210 for 8TB is crazy.

Lynn McGuire wrote:

I just figured out how to get my 8 TB bare drive out of the WD 8 TB USB
external drive to work in a pc as a backup drive. The drive was
formatted exFAT which hung the file server pc boot for some reason. I
put the USB daughter board back on the bare drive and hooked it up to my
office pc. It came right up. I reformatted it NTFS with 4 KB sectors. I
removed the USB daughter board and put the bare drive back into the file
server pc. The file server pc came right up and the drive was D:. Life
is good and I saved $80 by buying the WD USB external 8 TB drive instead
of the bare drive.

https://www.amazon.com/Book-Desktop-...dp/B01LQQHLGC/
and
https://tinkertry.com/liberate-weste...re-to-save-big

Did you look at the model number of the white label HDD that you removed
from the enclosure? One user noted in a forum that he found an 8TB Blue
5400 RPM drive inside (although WDC won't call them Blue for 8TB
drives).

https://www.servethehome.com/wd-book...zx-benchmarks/

Looks like WDC had some 7200 RPM drives inside the enclosure at one time
but downgraded to 5400 RPM drives.

https://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit.../dp/B01LQVFIL2

So you can get the HDD separately for the same cost of the HDD inside
the USB enclosure. Well, if you're tossing the enclosure then you
didn't save any money but you did spend more of your time to extract the
drive from the enclosure that you discard. However, since the base
drive is not sold retail then it doesn't have a warranty, and removing
it from the USB enclosure voids that warranty.

On Tue, 22 Aug 2017 22:07:06 -0500, VanguardLH wrote:

Lynn McGuire wrote:

I just figured out how to get my 8 TB bare drive out of the WD 8 TB USB
external drive to work in a pc as a backup drive. The drive was
formatted exFAT which hung the file server pc boot for some reason. I
put the USB daughter board back on the bare drive and hooked it up to my
office pc. It came right up. I reformatted it NTFS with 4 KB sectors. I
removed the USB daughter board and put the bare drive back into the file
server pc. The file server pc came right up and the drive was D:. Life
is good and I saved $80 by buying the WD USB external 8 TB drive instead
of the bare drive.

https://www.amazon.com/Book-Desktop-...dp/B01LQQHLGC/
and
https://tinkertry.com/liberate-weste...re-to-save-big

Did you look at the model number of the white label HDD that you removed
from the enclosure? One user noted in a forum that he found an 8TB Blue
5400 RPM drive inside (although WDC won't call them Blue for 8TB
drives).

https://www.servethehome.com/wd-book...zx-benchmarks/

Looks like WDC had some 7200 RPM drives inside the enclosure at one time
but downgraded to 5400 RPM drives.

https://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit.../dp/B01LQVFIL2

So you can get the HDD separately for the same cost of the HDD inside
the USB enclosure. Well, if you're tossing the enclosure then you
didn't save any money but you did spend more of your time to extract the
drive from the enclosure that you discard. However, since the base
drive is not sold retail then it doesn't have a warranty, and removing
it from the USB enclosure voids that warranty.

Just curious, but what about the fact that a drive that's been removed
from an external enclosure, when checked at the WD site, says it does
have a warranty? Is their tool wrong? AFAIK, no one has tried to get
warranty service and reported their results, so I don't know.

Also, from what I've seen, most/many folks are reporting that the drive
they pull out doesn't have a white label. It's a standard Red or
sometimes Blue drive, from what I've read.

On 08/23/2017 06:55 PM, Mark Perkins wrote:

I just figured out how to get my 8 TB bare drive out of the WD 8 TB USB
external drive to work in a pc as a backup drive. The drive was
formatted exFAT which hung the file server pc boot for some reason. I
put the USB daughter board back on the bare drive and hooked it up to my
office pc. It came right up. I reformatted it NTFS with 4 KB sectors. I
removed the USB daughter board and put the bare drive back into the file
server pc. The file server pc came right up and the drive was D:. Life
is good and I saved $80 by buying the WD USB external 8 TB drive instead
of the bare drive.

https://www.amazon.com/Book-Desktop-...dp/B01LQQHLGC/
and
https://tinkertry.com/liberate-weste...re-to-save-big

Did you look at the model number of the white label HDD that you removed
from the enclosure? One user noted in a forum that he found an 8TB Blue
5400 RPM drive inside (although WDC won't call them Blue for 8TB
drives).

https://www.servethehome.com/wd-book...zx-benchmarks/

Looks like WDC had some 7200 RPM drives inside the enclosure at one time
but downgraded to 5400 RPM drives.

https://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit.../dp/B01LQVFIL2

So you can get the HDD separately for the same cost of the HDD inside
the USB enclosure. Well, if you're tossing the enclosure then you
didn't save any money but you did spend more of your time to extract the
drive from the enclosure that you discard. However, since the base
drive is not sold retail then it doesn't have a warranty, and removing
it from the USB enclosure voids that warranty.

Just curious, but what about the fact that a drive that's been removed
from an external enclosure, when checked at the WD site, says it does
have a warranty? Is their tool wrong? AFAIK, no one has tried to get
warranty service and reported their results, so I don't know.

Also, from what I've seen, most/many folks are reporting that the drive
they pull out doesn't have a white label. It's a standard Red or
sometimes Blue drive, from what I've read.

I don't know about Red or Blue, but AFAICS they are Helium-filled
drives, rather than SMR drives, which is what are in many of the Seagate
externals of that capacity.

Perce

On 8/22/2017 10:07 PM, VanguardLH wrote:
Lynn McGuire wrote:

I just figured out how to get my 8 TB bare drive out of the WD 8 TB USB
external drive to work in a pc as a backup drive. The drive was
formatted exFAT which hung the file server pc boot for some reason. I
put the USB daughter board back on the bare drive and hooked it up to my
office pc. It came right up. I reformatted it NTFS with 4 KB sectors. I
removed the USB daughter board and put the bare drive back into the file
server pc. The file server pc came right up and the drive was D:. Life
is good and I saved $80 by buying the WD USB external 8 TB drive instead
of the bare drive.

https://www.amazon.com/Book-Desktop-...dp/B01LQQHLGC/
and
https://tinkertry.com/liberate-weste...re-to-save-big

Did you look at the model number of the white label HDD that you removed
from the enclosure? One user noted in a forum that he found an 8TB Blue
5400 RPM drive inside (although WDC won't call them Blue for 8TB
drives).

https://www.servethehome.com/wd-book...zx-benchmarks/

Looks like WDC had some 7200 RPM drives inside the enclosure at one time
but downgraded to 5400 RPM drives.

https://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit.../dp/B01LQVFIL2

So you can get the HDD separately for the same cost of the HDD inside
the USB enclosure. Well, if you're tossing the enclosure then you
didn't save any money but you did spend more of your time to extract the
drive from the enclosure that you discard. However, since the base
drive is not sold retail then it doesn't have a warranty, and removing
it from the USB enclosure voids that warranty.

Yes, it is the WD80EZZX drive. Note that those bare drives on Big River
are extracted from USB enclosures also.

Lynn

On Wed, 23 Aug 2017 17:55:09 -0500, Mark Perkins
wrote:

Just curious, but what about the fact that a drive that's been removed
from an external enclosure, when checked at the WD site, says it does
have a warranty? Is their tool wrong?

No, the tool is not wrong. What you forgot is how the warranty is to
be handled. It goes from the end-user to the reseller. Which is where
the end-user has a problem if the drive was removed from an external
box.

On Thu, 24 Aug 2017 10:49:09 -0500, wrote:

On Wed, 23 Aug 2017 17:55:09 -0500, Mark Perkins
wrote:

Just curious, but what about the fact that a drive that's been removed
from an external enclosure, when checked at the WD site, says it does
have a warranty? Is their tool wrong?

No, the tool is not wrong. What you forgot is how the warranty is to
be handled. It goes from the end-user to the reseller. Which is where
the end-user has a problem if the drive was removed from an external
box.

That sounds good, but I'd be surprised if it works that way. In the
past, when I've had warranty issues with a hard drive, they don't ask me
where I bought it or when I bought it or whether it was packaged inside
an external enclosure. They only ask for the serial number and off we
go.

Folks are reporting that drives pulled from MyBook enclosures are
standard Red or Blue drives, with serial numbers that indicate a valid
warranty exists. I'd be pretty surprised if WD were to deny warranty
coverage on those drives. People with a MyBook who haven't yanked the
drives out will have an entirely different kind of serial number and
warranty, based on a MyBook rather than on a bare drive. If WD didn't
intend to offer a warranty on the drive itself, it would be trivial for
them to invalidate the drive warranty on every drive that gets earmarked
for installation into a MyBook enclosure.

jerryab wrote:

Mark Perkins wrote:

Just curious, but what about the fact that a drive that's been removed
from an external enclosure, when checked at the WD site, says it does
have a warranty? Is their tool wrong?

No, the tool is not wrong. What you forgot is how the warranty is to
be handled. It goes from the end-user to the reseller. Which is where
the end-user has a problem if the drive was removed from an external
box.

The user will have to store the enclosure during the life of the
warranty. If there is a problem with the drive, the user will have to
put the drive back into the enclosure (if possible and without visible
damage showing the enclosure was opened) when sending back the "unit"
that was purchased and warranteed.

One of the referenced articles mentioned doing a burn-in of the USB unit
before dismantling it to extract the drive. If there is a problem with
the drive, the user hasn't spent time extracting the drive to only put
it back in the enclosure so they can warranty the unit with the seller.

They don't pry apart the case. They will use a clamp to squeeze the
proper half or side of the case to dislodge the tangs holding the shell
halves together. They'll notice broken tangs showing the case was
forcibly opened. Some manufacturers employ a "hook" that will snap
together when the shell halves are pressed together and breaks when the
shell is pulled apart. There may be a tamper-evident sticker that
cannot be removed without damage and which gets ripped when the case is
opened showing the case was opened hence voiding the warranty. The
sticker doesn't have to be on the outside. Engage tangs on one side of
the case, apply a sticker to the inside across a seam, and then snap
together the tangs on the other side of the case. The case can be
ultrasonically welded together and you won't have the gear to reweld the
plastic together. You cannot reseal the product before sending it in
for warranty coverage. Safety media tamper dye can be applied inside
the case which stains you but also the case. There are other tamper
evident techniques.

I'm waiting for someone to use a dye pack inside an external drive case.
They'll know if you tampered with the case to open it but so will all
your family and coworkers when they notice your stained hands. Okay,
you're probably pranked if this ever happens.

On Thu, 24 Aug 2017 14:21:53 -0500, VanguardLH wrote:

jerryab wrote:

Mark Perkins wrote:

Just curious, but what about the fact that a drive that's been removed
from an external enclosure, when checked at the WD site, says it does
have a warranty? Is their tool wrong?

No, the tool is not wrong. What you forgot is how the warranty is to
be handled. It goes from the end-user to the reseller. Which is where
the end-user has a problem if the drive was removed from an external
box.

The user will have to store the enclosure during the life of the
warranty. If there is a problem with the drive, the user will have to
put the drive back into the enclosure (if possible and without visible
damage showing the enclosure was opened) when sending back the "unit"
that was purchased and warranteed.

I think it would be a lot easier to trash the enclosure and treat the
drive itself as the warranteed item. So far, I haven't seen anything
that prevents that.