[HOW-TO] Unboxing and disassemble a SEAGATE expansion 5TB external drive use internally

Save money by buying an external drive and use it as an internal bare drive in your NAS or PC or MAC as a backup.

[clarkbilly]

Thanx ~!~ I had to watch 6 other videos on how to open my drive. Yours was the one that helped me the most. All the others didn't have your actual demo.

[ergusto]

Just chucked an old one of these I had lying around into a Hackintosh I just built. Cheers for the easy to follow guide! Saved a lot of headaches.

[Billlupton]

saved me a considerable amount of time and probably saving the plastic container, Thanks

[ayitsyaboi]

Thank you! Picked one of these up for the same price as an internal drive. I used a razor blade to make enough room to slip a card in to avoid gouging the enclosure and it came out without a scratch.

[martmeister]

Thanks. I managed to get mine apart today with no issues.

[nogoogleplus]

Helpful vid for people: Back up your drive before doing if you have anything you want on there. I did it with a full 4TB drive ....took the drive out no problem, but then it was unrecognizable by my mac. I had to use data recovery software to get the files back.

[acquaintfate]

What I wonder is why are they charging more for internal hard drives rather than external ones?

[nikonman]

Great video. I bought this drive only to find that my DirecTV DVR wasn't compatible with USB drives. I have an eSata drive enclosure on the way and now this drive should be a snap to exchange into the new enclosure.

[pcwwaydawn]

You get a like for the TETRIS music, thanks for the info!

[kosta]

You can get 8TB Seagate Expansion drive for just $170 while the cheapest internal 8TB drive is $226. That's a saving of $56! For that amount you can get additional 2TB internal drive.

Although...
External hard drives are usually the worst drives that come off the production line. That's exactly why they have 1 year warranty.

[lucashampson]

Awesome now I have 3060gb of space! I was hoping I wasn't going to have to use USB to plug in my external drive. Great vid.

[gabriellindor]

This is absolutely my hard drive. So happy to see this!!! Thank you!!

[MacSoundSolutions]

Thanks for the video! I have three of the 8 terabyte version and they all work. I bought two more from newegg and one went dead a few minutes after reformatting and the next one then stopped working as well within the same day. I took both out of their cases after watching your video to see if I could get them working thinking it could be the power supply or usb 3 port that was fried. One came back to life after installing it in my probox esata 4 bay external enclosure and has been working fine since the other one is dead so I put it back in it's case and am returning it to get another one. The drive that comes in the 8T version case is a Seagate Barracuda compute model 80000DM004 256 cache could not find the specs on the RPMs not even in the manual for the drive with specs. It's odd that Seagate does not list the model on their main page but if you dig deeper it is in there. I get 175 mbps read and write after reformatting it for mac. Very good for a drive this size but I have seen that they have not been very reliable for many reviewers on newegg so one has to be diligent in backing up these suckers. The first two I bought I got from amazon. I decided to create a raid 0 with them as a test for fun and I now have a 16 terabyte raid with 300mbps read and write. I have been using the raid to edit with FCPX on my 2010 12 core mac pro with usb 3 card installed and it has been working great, I connected them to a power strip so I can power them off and on. I backup my projects every day. It is bound to be the cheapest 16 terabyte raid out there. $338 bucks at $169 per drive. That's $21 bucks per terabyte. That's just nuts! My first 1 gig hard drive was a microtech scsi and it cost $5000.00 I think that was around 1990 connected to a Mac II fx :)

[Philc]

Thanks for the visuals. Mine was a 5400 RPM. I reused the USB 3 board / enclosure for my old USB 2.0 external (iOmega) Samsung 1.5T drive. It is from 2009, but somewhat low mileage, and I have yet to test the speeds. I am assuming faster transfer, but i guess that also depends on the drive firmware. Well, it seems good - around 90 MB/sec :)

[koilamaoh]

Not always guaranteed, since shipping causes drives to "DOA", which also causes bad sectors, crc errors, I always test them 1st day. Also you can reuse that as a free HD case.

[mikemiddleton]

Thank you very much.. I've been staring at this enclosure for a few days, off and on, and couldn't see that seam.

[seans]

Thanks for taking the time an uploading the video. Just have to comment on how shitty HDDs are nowadays. I don't seem to learn my lesson and just ordered up a 4th Seagate external drive to pop into my PC...they are just so damn cheap compared to all other INTERNAL drives...you would think they (external) would be more expensive because they are putting it in a enclosure, extra board and power supply, but that is not the case.
So first two SGs 3TBs...crapped out in less then 2 years
Last night..less then 1 year and poof goes the 5TB SG
I can actual point out the sound the drives make when they are on the way out
I also decided to take a hit, lose 1TB and pay more, but decided to give a WD Red NAS 4TB a go...sick of transferring close to 3TB of shit every time a drive takes a shit...that takes a long freaking time!!!
Not like the drives had the shit kicked out of them, using it as a media server to host up to a couple of Smart TVs

[Mazxlol]

i would recommend to first test the drive to make sure it works 100%. Then open it up! :D

[bigt]

This was very helpful I know what to do but couldn’t get it open save $$$$ on HDD and SSD, external hard drive‘s are far cheaper than internal this is such an easy way to to get around the big bill

[paulfreeman]

Got me one of these today for a bargain (4 TB). Thank you, was wondering how this casing opens.