So I obtained a broken external hard drive which has lead me to an interesting discovery. In this scandalous case the cat is the main suspect for knocking it off the side. But I get to rip it apart! The patient in this autopsy is a Fujitsu Siemens StorageBird, 35ev840, Rev: 1.1. 1.5TB. Was a little bit of a pain to open due to the slightly ridged white plastic, left a few scratches on the case but nothing broken.

So this is what’s inside:

Does not look like much does it?

Just a Hard drive with a USB interface board. I think I’m going to hi-jack the USB to SATA board as this will be great for turning old HDDs into big memory sticks for backups or a large USB bootable Linux distro could be possible? Hopefully it will play nice with other HDDs

External HDDs are Cheaper than Internal

After googleing around a bit for a possible replacement HDD I’ve noticed something. An external HDD is cheaper than an internal one.

For Example lets look at the Toshiba 2TB Stor.E Canvio External Hard Drive available on EBuyer for £60. The cheapest 2TB HDD available from Toshiba is £70 . It’s only £10 difference but its the same for the 3TB version with a £8 difference.

Here is an extreme version. Hitachi Touro External HDD 4TB £125 whereas 4TB internal £203. Thats £78 Difference. The internal HDD may not be the same in the finer details like read/write and rpm (I would assume the externals are 5400 instead of 7200) and this is assuming it is a standard HDD inside but for raw space that is quite a saving. I picked the cheapest available 4TB HDD to compare it with. At the end of the day it might just come down to externals selling better and the prices can afford to be that low.

… Strange