Comment by jacquesm
9 days ago
That depends on the brand. The lower priced brands, yes, those can be SATA, the more vertically integrated companies also make custom PCBs that just have USB-C without any SATA interface exposed internally.
9 days ago
That depends on the brand. The lower priced brands, yes, those can be SATA, the more vertically integrated companies also make custom PCBs that just have USB-C without any SATA interface exposed internally.
I've shucked WD MyBook drives, just a plain SATA inside. I guess that it's cheaper to have a stock drive and a cheap SATA-USB adaptor in a shell than do custom electronics. I've not heard of any that are otherwise, but I've only done a few. I suppose it's possible that they could solder them in or have custom electronics but I would have thought that rare. It's frequently discussed on Reddit too, so there's plenty of folk doing this.
Do you mean the big ones or the SSD ones?
The big ones with a separate power brick, I've not looked inside the smaller USB-powered ones. My interest was in the >8Gb desktop drives. I'd imagine they're the same deal, but hard to say from the outside. I did have a part of one at one point, a USB-to-SATA circuit board that was useful for adhoc connecting 2.5" drives, but I can't recall if that came from an prebuilt or an old BYOD enclosure.
I have a old WD small one that's kinda faulty (plugged it in then put it down heavily, it's not been right since), I should pop it open just to see what's inside, but it's older than the USBC models so could easily have changed. In any case, I don't think AI is eating the stock of slow laptop HDDs, so I'm not sure there's any need to buy these just for shucking.
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It's probably feasible to make a "mass storage USB in, SATA protocol out" smart adapter board.
I see, but if you plan on shucking you obviously get ones you know are able to.