Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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Can you shuck a drive BOTH before & after it has been written to? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Specifically a WD Elements (22gb).

Thanks!

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Generally the enclosures are just that, enclosures that offer the connection. There are exceptions though where enclosure does something more. Some enclosures do encryption and some just use the same controller for single drive and multidrive and your one drive is actually set up as a 1 drive raid array in which case you may have data slightly shifted to accomodate the headers for that. You can then still recreate everything, but it's a pain.

But as I said, generally they're just providing the drive as is in which case there won't be any issue.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

You can shuck it anyway, if you mean if you can access the data in the same way without the enclosure, with large/new drives, yes. There are some (older/much TB-smaller) enclosures which have encryption in the enclosure, and the content of the disk is actually encrypted all the time even you don't set a password (so you can flip the encryption on instantly) but here it isn't the case.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I did it and was surprised it worked because people told me it wouldn't. If I'd known that, it would've saved me a lot of copying and backupping.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Except it's not always the case. I had a few WD Elements/Easystores that I had data on, shucked them, and couldn't read them in Windows. It wasn't encrypted, just something funky done with the partitioning and couldn't use it until I destroyed existing and created new partitions.

But it can't hurt to try it first, you should be able to throw it back in the enclosure to get access to the data, although good idea to have a backup anyhow.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

people told me it wouldn't

It is beyond belief how misinformation gets propagated over Internet, at least here it's something more subtle, but it's really weird how people constantly come asking about 3.5" if they are shuckable at all (as in if the internal drive is "normal", not that they would want the data, they'd like to just shuck the drive from the start). What's more people even manage to gaslit themselves that somehow in the past they've had personally some 3.5" external with the USB directly on the PCB!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

There was the pin 3 issue.

I shucked an 8TB WD, and it didn't work in my computer. I put it in a WD My Cloud (Wish I had gone Synology then, and not his along the way) and it's working fine.

Maybe that issue made people hesitant?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

That's somehow fine, as there is a small seed of a real issue (although it's on the power supply side not on the drive side, and it's easy to understand and to contain) but to have people scaring themselves on Internet about 3.5" drives with USB directly on the PCB, even if nobody ever has seen one in the whole history of the universe, but you know just in case, like they would be appearing like some mutating viruses, and even more PEOPLE TRICKING THEMSELVES after reading all this fear mongering that "I really really feel like I've gotten one before" it's absolutely next level.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

There was the pin 3 issue.

If you mean the 3.3v pin, I wouldn't classify that issue as a "was" quite yet.

My most modern PSU is a Corsair RM850x, released June 2022 according to the shop page. Now maybe Corsair actually makes shit hardware; I'm no expert. But in any case, I have a pretty freakin new power supply that needs tape.

So honestly, I'd say the misinformation is that the pin issue ever went away.

I shucked an 8TB WD, and it didn't work in my computer. I put it in a WD My Cloud

Yeah, funny enough, the DAS boxes I've used always bypass the pin issue. Or I guess I should say that they function properly.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Back in the days I did that, I had some issues with it being unreadable with my 3 end 4TB ones.

Something to do with it internally converting MBR in the USB to SATA controller or something like that to allow larger disks on older systems. I don't remember the specifics.

Anyway, it can be that your data becomes unreadable, and you'll have to convert it with TestDisk or so. Or make sure you'll initialize it as GPT from the first time. Not sure if that will help.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago

Yes