Taking apart an external drive

[Wired Monkey]

I'd like to remove my external Seagate USB 3.0 hard drive from it's case (probably have to destroy the case it to do this) and stick it into my Orico eSATA 5-bay.  Will drive pool see this drive correctly?

[Christopher (Drashna)]

This depends heavily on the conroller/bridge chip for the enclosure. 

 

I believe that it shouldn't be an issue, but can't be sure.  

Specifically, as long as the contents can be seen on the other enclosure, there will be no issue. But if the enclosure is "messing" with the data, then you'd need to remove the drive from the pool, move it and then re-add it to the pool.

[Wired Monkey]

I was afraid you were going to say that. I guess I'll see if I can take it apart carefully. If not, i'll do the remove from drive pool method.

 

Thank you for the reply.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Well, if its a larger drive, (eg, has a 3.5" drive inside), then you probably will be fine. 

The real fun is the 2.5" drives, as the USB connector is usually part of the drives PCB.....

[Erik Wright]

I'd like to remove my external Seagate USB 3.0 hard drive from it's case (probably have to destroy the case it to do this) and stick it into my Orico eSATA 5-bay.  Will drive pool see this drive correctly?

 

This depends heavily on the conroller/bridge chip for the enclosure. 

 

I believe that it shouldn't be an issue, but can't be sure.  

Specifically, as long as the contents can be seen on the other enclosure, there will be no issue. But if the enclosure is "messing" with the data, then you'd need to remove the drive from the pool, move it and then re-add it to the pool.

 

From my 5 years both selling consumer electronics and repairing computers in a retail situation, I've yet to come across a Seagate drive with any fancy trickery going on under the hood.

Usually its the Western Digital drives that have circuit boards with hardware encryption chips built in that cause the drive to appear scrambled when not used inside its' original enclosure.

 

A useful feature for data security and encryption for sure, but very annoying if say the enclosure or drive begins to fail and you want to try to save the data...

 

*Western Digital drives that have these logic boards can be used outside of their enclosures, but they must be re-formatted once taken out of their enclosure.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

I have seen the "obfuscation" done on some Seagate externals (namely, the desktop/3.5" models), but yeah, it's not the norm for Seagate. 

 

Also, I've seen "off the shelf" external enclosures do this as well. 

 

So I'd rather assume the worst here.