I can buy a 4tb USB3 external hard drive for around about 50GBP
It contains a 2.5" 5400RPM SATA hard drive and a small circuit board to interface SATA to USB3
I can’t buy a 4TB 2.5" 5400 RPM hard drive on its own for less than about 80GBP
The spec and quality of the drive inside the USB caddy appears to be pretty decent, so it’s not just dirt cheap inferior drives being packaged for USB connectivity.
So what’s going on? Is this just a matter of volume of sales driving prices down on external storage?
One reason is that desktop hard drives can be used universally in almost any desktop. Laptops are far more proprietary in nature. You usually need a specific hard drive for a specific desktop brand/model of machine. The general rule of thumb is that, the more proprietary the equipment, the more expensive it is because you have to get THEIRS. Because of the general nature of desktop hard drives, you have a far wider scope of shopping options, which pushes down the prices because of competition.
Nah…
Laptop drives might require an unusual mount, but they are all 2.5” SATA drives.
Not true, of course, for SSDs - there are a bunch of variations in interface and form factor for those.
This doesn’t seem right. Laptop manufacturers mostly use hard drives that can be purchased off the shelf. Accessing the hard drive can be a pain, but the actual units are typically something you can buy off the shelf, though in some cases higher end models. This is true not just for laptops but for PS4s, XBoxes, or whatever.
In the case of the OP, it’s hard to say without knowing the actual specs. RPMs are nice, but they don’t tell the whole story. It could also be a fire sale to clear warehouse space. Or an older model being cleared out. Or different manufacturers. Or something else. You can check Newegg or Amazon or wherever for ‘2.5" SATA 5400 RPM hard drive’ and get products with a wide range of prices for both external and internal units.
It used to be true for laptop IDE drives - there was inconsistency on the placement of the connector pins and jumpers, but I’m pretty sure SATA drives have got this nailed down now - there are several different form factors for thickness, but there’s a fairly high level of standardisation now.
It is pretty common to use laptop 2.5" drives in desktop builds. Same form factor for SATA 2.5" SSD’s. Nothing really special or proprietary about it. I don’t think thats the issue.
There does seem to be way more selection of external drives than laptop. I could not filter the external drives for format on the site I was looking at, but many of them are 2.5".
It is getting to the point where SSD’s are pretty close in price to HDD’s, at least for SATA level performance. It seems there is more selection of SSD’s than HDD’S in 2.5" now.
I can’t find any bare 2.5" drive that is cheaper than the equivalent capacity of USB connected externals.
I will check on the drive specs for the one I tore down recently - it was a Seagate 4tb USB backup drive - it stopped working (no volume available) so I opened it and found that it’s only the USB to SATA interface card that is faulty, so I got one of these, which is fine, but now I have to make a new protective case…
…then I got to thinking: why don’t I make a number of cases, buy a bunch of these USB connectors and bare hard drives and make myself a stack of backup drives (I need quite a few as I am archiving raw and produced video footage).
But I can’t find any hard drives that are cheaper than the ready-made USB-connected version. It’s weird.
I’ll check the specs on the actual bare drive that I pulled out of my Seagate USB drive - maybe it’s not actually 5400 rpm unit after all, or something like that
OK, I just rechecked a few things and I might be barking up the wrong tree - the google shopping search results I was looking at for 4TB USB devices that were giving me prices circa 50 GBP all appear to be bait and switch deals where that price actually links to the 1tb variant - and when you click the 4tb choice option, the price jumps up to 80 or 90 GBP
So actually, it looks like the price might be around level for the USB drive vs bare drive, which makes sense, because the implementation of USB to SATA seems possible with very few components now
But there is a disparity in 3.5" internal HDDs vs. USB drives. Seagate and WD 8TB USB drives are $140 on Amazon right now, while the cheapest bare drives are around $150 for Seagate and $215 for WD.
I don’t have a definitive answer but I suspect it’s because (A) USB drives aren’t guaranteed to have a specific spec drive inside, so the manufacturer can use any hard drive they have excess production capability for, and (B) internal drives are more likely to be damaged by the customer during installation and then returned as “defective.”
In a way, there’s more price competition for USB hard drives—they’re routinely purchased by consumers for extra space, backups, etc. Meanwhile, bare drives are largely purchased either in bulk by OEMs or in small quantities by enthusiasts.
So selling a USB drive as a loss leader will bring in a general consumer to buy other things, while loss-leader bare drives only attract computer enthusiasts. The general consumers may be more valuable to the retailer, so the USB drives may get discounted more often and to a greater degree. In other words, someone somewhere is always selling USB drives as a loss leader, while the same isn’t true of bare drives. (I’m speculating here—I don’t mean to present that as a fact).
It could also be that the discount for buying a pallet of bare drives is so great that the cost of the enclosure and the labor to assemble the drive is still less than the usual transaction price for a single bare drive.
Realistically, it’s probably a combination of these things.
also I wouldn’t put it past them to use “slower” drives in the USB enclosures e.g. less onboard cache, lower density platters and/or cheaper controllers since USB’s relative slowness would hide the true differences in drive performance.
Also, contributing to this effect (and I’m only speculating, too), an external USB drive is more of an optional purchase – someone only mildly worried about backups might get one for backup at $40, but not bother at $60. Whereas an internal drive is usually a necessary and critical component, so a higher price won’t lower sales by as much (assuming competitors are at the same price).
an external drive can always be opened, sometimes with difficulty, and one can then proceed to the extraction of the 2.5 drive within and use it wherever one pleases.
People “shuck” external drives to get the drive and use it as an internal drive. I’ve done this.
One source (but not the only one) for external drives are batches that come off the line that aren’t testing all that great. You are not getting (hopefully) a lemon but maybe one from a set that had a little bit of lemoness in it.
In terms of hours of use, external drives are typically run far less than internal ones. And heavy use can turn a borderline drive into a return submitted under warranty.
So instead of throwing all of those out, take some of the better-but-maybe-not-perfect ones and stuff them in external HD cases. Since these drives are worth less, they charge less.
If you look around at people shucking external HDs, you can find that a particular model of case and size could have 3 or more different HD models inside them. Some get crappier ones, some get higher end ones. There’s no way to tell based on the product number or anything what you’ll get. Because it’s whatever they have sitting around they want to get rid of.
Note: The one I shucked most recently is an internal drive used as a backup. So, similar usage as the external drive just with less crap sitting around the desk.
Yeah, I reckon it’s got to be a lot to do with rated duty cycle. WD is now banding their drives in clear categories now, each one with certain strengths and compromised for different applications. I guess the devices rolling off production for USB will be tailored (or binned) for the purpose
Sorry for the wall of text. TLDR - Externals = drives that didn’t pass full testing or are overruns + public demand for low prices
I’ve decased dozens of external drives and have over two dozen currently in use right now.
Up until the end 2018, the WD 8TB Eaxystore externals all had WD Red NAS drives (reports are that they’re regular line drives now), either regular red label or white label drives that are intended for OEM sellers or didn’t failed testing in some way. Some white labels were pasted over the original red label, showing they were ready to ship, but rebadged after the fact. All the drives model numbers matched ones in the red label NAS line.
Not passing full NAS requirements are fine for home users since they’re built with higher quality components and built to higher specs for 24/7 use in high heat, high vibration (compared to home use) environments.
I just got and decased three WD 12TB Easystores and they all white label drives. The model numbers don’t match any red NAS drives exactly, but people have confirmed from other data on the drives that they’re part of the Red NAS line. Makes sense since the 12TB WD drives are either Red - NAS, Gold - Enterprise or Purple - Surveillance. More about his below.
There is speculation that some 12TB WD drives may be 14TB drives that failed testing and rebadged as white label 12TB’s with different firmware to lock them to 12TB. This seems like a good possibility since 14TB Easystore drives are now available. Following the logic, these may be rebadged 16TB drives.
There is no evidence or logic to manufacturers having a separate production line for cheaper/lower quality drives.
Which leads to overruns. Hard drives are now commodities with supply and demand fluctuating constantly. If you look at the manufacture date of a hard drive, which usually is when the warranty period starts, it’s no more than a few months old. The factories, of which there are a handful, WD and Seagate being the biggest like any factory must be constantly producing product to remain profitable. They have to be ready to the hundreds of thousands of drives a datacenter may order. Don’t fulfill the order and they’ll go to to another brand because they can’t wait. Have a “bad” run of NAS drives that you either sell them a third party who may not want them because it risks their reputation or sell them yourself as externals.
In 2013, the Thailand flood hit the WD factory there and it had to be shut down. Hard drive prices skyrocketed for over a year demand outstripped supply, with big buyer datacenter orders getting the priority. The same thing happened years prior when the Hynix RAM factory in Korea caught fire. RAM prices skyrocketed with big PC builders getting the bulk of available RAM. Note that datacenters and PC builders don’t get a huge discount of drives, RAM or processors. They’re all commodities driven by supply and demand.
Edit: I have at least one spare 6, 8, 10 and 12TB drive as a backup to my backups and to tide me over if another catastrophic event takes another hard drive factory out.
When Seagate introduced the first 8TB drive, because of the technology at the time, they were notoriously slow to write to (reads are fine) and probably didn’t sell well. So they put them in external cases and sold them at a lower price that way. The beginning of the external drive price drops. Datacenter Backblaze bought 48? of them as a test. They eventually removed them all from service because they didn’t perform well in their server racks.
Consumer demand. Supply and demand. As I said above, to my knowledge and memory, Seagate started the cheap external battle when they 8TB Archive drives didn’t sell well. WD countered and the price battle has escalated since.
As for why 2.5" drives are more expensive than 3.5" ones, miniaturization costs money. Higher build requirements due to size + need to able to withstand vibration and shock that the drive in your desktop doesn’t usually experience.
Supply and demand is another prime factor. SSDs are not rice competitive with mechanical drives. And barring some breakthrough in RAM technology or new storage methods such as the long promised bubble storage, SSDs will continue to demand a premium price, though they’ve dropped tremendously since their introduction.
Then there’s physical limitations in building larger capacity drives, both 2.5" and 3.5". 4TB and 5TB 2.5" drives are thicker than smaller drives because they have more platters. To get more data on a 2.5" form factor either the data capacity of the platters must be higher, risking data corruption or slowing performance, or more platters installed in a bigger case.
Are you referring to shingled magnetic recording (SMR) drives? I thought those were always understood to be special-purpose drives, intended for backups and data archiving. They work fine when writing large blocks of data sequentially. They are extremely slow when you try to write many small files to it, or worse, multiple processes writing to it at the same time.