I haven’t bought them specifically for that, but I have harvested drives from them. A lot of times, you’ll have to destroy the enclosure to get to the drive. If you’re ok with that, go for it.

Yup, with 2,5" Seagates. Reused the enclosure with smaller used enterprise ssds to make cheap USB sticks.

after doing it for a few drives and observing the failure rates of said drives i just buy drives with warranties now. i've got a few shucked drives still kicking around though.

Not specifically, no. When I did change to building my own NAS, I cracked open my older 4TB backup drive to use as a spare.

I've shucked a few drives in the past but when there was a big sale on hard drives awhile back I finished decking my NAS out with 8TB drives that weren't shucked as they came out to be cheaper than the ones in enclosures at the time.

The main downside is warranty really and some of the drives from enclosures need to have the power blocked on one of the pins to work (can't remember which sorry) due to the type of drive they are.

Yup. /r/Datahoarder guided me right. Got two of the recommended model of MyBook and shucked them. This was 2-3 years ago. Disks are still going strong in my NAS.

Indeed. That's how I populated my NAS with 3 10TB drives and saved around 120 dollars total, and this was 4 years ago.

These are the ones I got: https://a.co/d/8x58jBY

The only extra thing was disabling the 3v pin, and that was it. Been running rock solid all this time.

Just make sure to research what disks are in the external housings you're planning on getting, as not all drives need to have pins removed/covered.

I think I'd buy 2nd hand quality server drivers before I'd shuck.

Personally I think it's a bad idea

There's lots of things that can go wrong and most of the time those drives are made in super controlled environments because they can be extremely sensitive. It's just not worth the headache

I did once. Well, more along the lines of "what did i buy this thing for, can use the HDD as is". The HDD had additional contact points at the bottom. Don't remember if they worked as is and what i did with them.