Hello everyone!
As a photographer without a lot of money, my girlfriend used external drives to backup her files. A few years ago, she was able to upgrade to two 8tb WD My Book: one that she uses on a day to day basis, the other as an exact copy (thank’s SuperDuper!).
But we now want to upgrade to a NAS. Since we will need a lots of storage (I was thinking four 8tb drives, so that we can have a few tb each with redundancy), I was wondering if I could use the drives inside the My Book in our NAS?
I could just open it, but I don’t want to ruin her hd before we buy our NAS, and I can’t find any reliable info about what’s inside. I’m sure there are some reliability issue in using used hd in a NAS, I’m just curious.
Yes you can and they’re quite easy to take apart with a prying tool and a Philips. A guitar pick or plastic spudger works well to get it started and then use a few additional credit cards to keep the clips apart. Check out some YouTube videos on sthucking these.
You may need to tape over one of the pins on the drive depending on whether your NAS can use the 3.3V reset pin or not. A small piece of Kapton tape works well for this and you can Google photos to see which pin it is/examples of taping.