[SOLVED] Negative drawbacks to putting external USB sata drive from case into my tower?

[faslanetech]

hi all, I see most hard drives that are sold without cases are much more expensive than external hard drives sold as external USB 3.0 hard drives but often have the same specs. For instance I just bought a 4 terabyte Western digital USB 3.0 external hard drive and the drive in it is a 7200 RPM with a 64GB cash like most standard internal hard drives. The same drive, without the USB case sold as a barebones drive is much more expensive at around 189 or so. So why don't people in general, buy the cheaper external drives and just take them out of the cases and put them in their Tower internally? granted I know you wouldn't have external storage then but instead of buying a more expensive barebones drive of the same speed and cash I'm tempted to just buy a couple externals and take them out of the case and put them in my tower since the RPM and cash is the same anyway. I don't see any drawbacks to do the doing this and I've done it before and still have the drives in my machine and they work great. I'm just curious why this is so much cheaper to buy external instead of a bare-bones internal? Granted unless you're buying a server or nass rated drive of course...are there any drawbacks other than the obvious not having an external drive? I have two 2 terabyte internals at the moment so basically I'm just going to put those drives in my new external cases which will fit perfectly and put the two 4 terabyte drives in my tower. They are all satta and they are all 7200 RPM with 64GB cash so other than that I can't see any drawbacks to doing so and I'll save quite a bit of money by doing this and still use my old drives in the new external cases, I've already done my homework there so other than that does anyone know of any other drawbacks and why people don't do this more often as long as the drives are the same as what they would be considering buying barebones anyway? Thank you

Edit, I meant 64 megabyte cache not gigabyte LOL

 

[Quarkzquarkz]

Couple things, usb drives will always be slower than if they were directly connected via SATA. You can research the performance numbers and this also applies from mechanical HDD to a SSD or (solid state drive) as well.

Another reason why people dont use external is that if you have an operating system dongled by a wire that can accidently be pulled out, bad things can happen, especially when you're rendering or doing something very cpu intensive.

And lastly, mechanical hard drives will always be cheap because the performance they output is no longer competitive to what we see today in Solid state drives. And your games and os and whatever else you put on it will be exceptionally fast to boot. Good luck!

 

[popatim]

Warranty is one. The drive is often a white label drive
I actually surprised you received a 7200Rpm drive. 5400 is usually what is in usb drives.

 

[faslanetech]

yeah I was too. It was a WD 7200 rpm in an external case. I did end up removin gthe drive and putting it in my tower on a sata port (of course) and it's been in there for months and running superb serving my Plex media. I bought the usb external because the barebones drives were all much more $$$. So far so good

 

[fzabkar]

Have you actually tried to use your old drives in WD's enclosure? You may be surprised to find that they don't work at all, or don't work as expected.

BTW, what was the model number of the HDD?

 

[jsmithepa]

As mentioned, typically 1 year warranty for the USB, and 2 years for the BARED.

Otherwise is fine, I did that once, the USB variety was actually cheaper and at that time I needed a USB backup anyway, later on, cracked that sucker open and put it in my new PC SATA.

One surprise though, that USB interface was dialed-in specifically for that drive, I couldn't use another drive with it.

 

[fzabkar]

One surprise though, that USB interface was dialed-in specifically for that drive, I couldn't use another drive with it.

You can sometimes defeat the firmware lock by snipping pin 8 (or pins 8 and 7) of the 8-pin serial flash memory chip. This invalidates the OEM firmware and reverts to the firmware embedded within the bridge IC.