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Comment by thrdbndndn | Hacker News Reader

> WD isn't selling the bare 2.5-inch drive on a standalone basis – at least not yet

Have been wondering about this for a while.

Even for the 3.5"s which they do sell the bare version, they're often more expensive than the packaged portable version. Lots of people therefore choose to buy them and then gut it to install the bare disks on their computers/NAS.

I don't quite get why it is this way. I can't imagine HDD have a large margin to begin with, surely the additional cost of a plastic casing, power adapter and cables should make them more expensive, not the opposite?

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I've heard that the lower quality drives get sold as portable ones since they wouldn't likely be powered on for as long as ones that were meant to be in computers. There's been various comments here and elsewhere about "shucked" drives not lasting as long, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21695478

I assumed that but then I've been torturing a usb WD 14TB drive for years with 24/7 writes backing up a busy logging server and it hasn't missed a beat. I guess it's just the luck of the draw?

Fwiw (antidotal) I have 8 shucked WD drives in my my nas approaching 5/6 years worth of power-on hours. Moderate to medium read-mostly use case. No data integrity issues (according to zfs).

Certainly getting near the age where I wouldn't be shocked if I started seeing failures crop up, but I've gotten my savings plenty worth there.

i dont know if true, but i imagine that a drive that is not constantly powered on and off might last longer.

True, and this one has the luxury of living in a data centre kept at a constant 27C and never being moved or knocked over. As far as USB hard drives go, this one is living its best life.

I'm entirely guessing, but the cost of warranty/support might be a factor too. If you buy an external drive in an enclosure, and mess up the removal-from-case and subsequent actual install, it's much easier to refuse obligations as the device was "misused". A bare drive sold to a private consumer probably has way more installation problems than anything else in this market.

(Again: guessing.)

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