[antonyh]

I've shucked WD MyBook drives, just a plain SATA inside. I guess that it's cheaper to have a stock drive and a cheap SATA-USB adaptor in a shell than do custom electronics. I've not heard of any that are otherwise, but I've only done a few. I suppose it's possible that they could solder them in or have custom electronics but I would have thought that rare. It's frequently discussed on Reddit too, so there's plenty of folk doing this.

[jacquesm]

Do you mean the big ones or the SSD ones?

[antonyh]

The big ones with a separate power brick, I've not looked inside the smaller USB-powered ones. My interest was in the >8Gb desktop drives. I'd imagine they're the same deal, but hard to say from the outside. I did have a part of one at one point, a USB-to-SATA circuit board that was useful for adhoc connecting 2.5" drives, but I can't recall if that came from an prebuilt or an old BYOD enclosure.

I have a old WD small one that's kinda faulty (plugged it in then put it down heavily, it's not been right since), I should pop it open just to see what's inside, but it's older than the USBC models so could easily have changed. In any case, I don't think AI is eating the stock of slow laptop HDDs, so I'm not sure there's any need to buy these just for shucking.