Anecdata: running shucked WD My Book/Easystore 8TB hard drives for over 5 years

When I was getting my feet wet with self-hosting, I learned about shucking, which involves taking an external hard drive, prying its plastic case off and using it as a normal SATA hard drive. It’s not possible with every external hard drive, but with most ones it works well, and the WD My Book and Easystore drives are a prime example of this. Back then, I remember quite a few people being skeptical about these hard drives, suggesting that they could be drives that were not good enough to be server-grade WD Red drives, so they were cheaply thrown into external enclosures and sold to customers. While I can’t disprove that, I can now provide a few data points that can help someone judge if similar approaches are worth trying. I got mine quite soon after I had bought three WD Red 4TB hard drives. WD Red drives were pricey, but then I had one of them die after 6 months and although warranty service replaced it, it made me think about the alternative option. The math supporting this…

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