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How to save $50 on a Seagate Barracuda 8TB drive while completely voiding its warranty

by 11 Comments

If you need to get an 8TB disk and fancy a Seagate, we have a way for you to save $50 per drive, while getting a free enclosure and a 100% void warranty. The disk in question is the Seagate Barracuda Internal Hard Drive 8TB SATA 6Gb/s 256MB Cache 3.5-Inch. Long name, I know. The 8TB flavor sells (new) for $180 on Amazon, or you can get the faster spinning 005 flavor for $319.95 over at B&H. Either way, there is a way to get this drive for $139.99 and still have some spare parts.

Seagate also sells something they call expansion drives, those are external drives that you can attach via USB to your computer and gain some extra space. The 8TB Desktop External Hard Drive, for example, costs $139.99 on Amazon or B&H. It’s a cool solution, its portable and the design is slick enough to look good on your desk. Now, before I continue with this post, is there anyone who cares to guess what is the hard drive inside that enclosure? The one that we saw getting opened had that same Seagate Barracuda Internal Hard Drive 8TB SATA 6Gb/s 256MB Cache 3.5-Inch drive inside.

To get it out, you need to pry the box open, disconnect the controller and there you have the hard drive. Interestingly, after “sourcing” the drive you are still left with a controller, a case, a USB 3.0 Cable, and a power adapter. You have to admit. This is not a bad deal for minus forty dollars. (And minus a warranty)

This, of course, raised a few questions marks with us, so we asked around. If my understanding of the explanation is correct, it may come from one of two reasons:

The first option is the drives inside the Expansion unit are older, refurbished, or simply visually impaired drives.

The other explanation we got was from the supply and demand realm. The OEM drive is targeting PROs who are willing to pay more, where the expansion unit is aimed at the general market, who are more price sensitive. I guess Seagate are also not committed to supplying the same internal hard drive in all their expansion units, so we have just been lucky.

Either way, there is a very high chance, I would say around 100%, that pulling this trick off, will void your Seagate Expansion warranty.

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  • yes I would and have. Really not that hard.

  • Joshua Hockman

    I have 4 of them, sourced just like this, that I use in Raid 0 as a back up to my regular 32TB (4x 8tb Iron Wolf) main media server array. They’re all Barracuda drives, and work perfectly for the job. Great article.

    • Ersin

      I did this trick 4 years ago when I first got my Synology NAS. All the drives that I ripped out of these enclosures where barracudas. After 4 years, they are still ticking 😉

  • gly

    Very interesting… I took apart a malfunctioning 3TB version years ago and found a re-certified Seagate drive. That has kept me from buying these expansion drives ever again. Anyone else find re-certified drives inside their enclosures?

  • Willem Hillier

    Actually, “shucking” the drive like this doesn’t void the warranty, at least not in the US. It is on the manufacturer to demonstrate that the consumer dissasembling the product was what caused it to fail. Of course, this is on the whole external drive, so you’d need to keep the enclosure etc. Actually winning in this situation would probably mean going against the manufacturer in small claims court, which would be a hassle for sure.

  • alexk
    • Joshua Hockman

      Wow! That’s a crazy bargain! Thanks for sharing!

  • always the cheapest way to get bigger capacity but the compromise is a slow drive than if you were to buy one bare bones- Thanks Seagate for not propreitorizing the interface so we can do things like this

  • GottaSay

    I am not sure I would mess with opening an external drive for 40 bucks. If you wait for a couple of months, the price of the internal drive itself will come down that much.

  • Absolutely!
    (Great way to source WD RED drives also)

    BUT
    Some of the newer USB powered drives have proprietary controllers on the board and are direct USB not sata. Worth keeping in mind

  • wagyourtail

    I totally havent sent a broken one in before after taking it out to attempt data recovery then putting the drive back in… (it worked)

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