Cheaper to salvage 2TB laptop HDD from Seagate portable HDD

As widely discussed since 2014, this trick still works in 2016, which is insane price arbitrage if you ask me.

Bought a 2TB Seagate Expansion Portable HDD for $117. The 2.5" SATA HDD inside, if purchased as a stand-alone unit, costs upwards of $165.

Prying this open requires a thin sturdy Swiss army knife blade (or something equivalent). A guitar pick was not rigid enough to do the job for me.

The way these newer casings are designed, the plastics catches on the end that you start prying are bound to break.

The other end should be OK if you are careful enough.

I didn't need the casing anyway, so I didn't care. But you can always put it together with a little creative application of black electrical tape, so I don't think it's too much of a problem, unless you are really picky about cosmetics.

After putting it into my laptop, SeaTools detects the HDD as ST2000LM007. Not much of a surprise here.

Pros:

$50 savings for 5 minutes' work

Cons:

You can never be 100% sure which brand/model HDD you are getting inside
You void the warranty

This approach is not for everyone, but the bang-for-buck ratio is really high for the adventurous to take a dive.

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Update: Line adapter for Ozito Blade Trimmer

Update (Dec 2021): If you access to a 3D printer, I would now recommend this solution , which makes it super easy to replace the trimmer line. I have been using it for a few months now with zero issue.

Line adapter for Ozito Blade Trimmer

This is an adapter for Ozito 18V battery trimmer (and possibly some Bosch trimmers as well) that uses a plastic blade for cutting. It lets you insert a 2.4mm trimmer line (about 8cm long) and use that for cutting. Simply cut a length of trimmer line and briefly heat up one end with a lighter so that a little bulb is formed. Then insert the trimmer line into the adapter and slot that into the trimmer as per normal. Make sure the trimmer line is not so long that it touches the safety guard. If that is the case, simply trim off any excess with a cutter or scissors. This part is best printed using PETG, which is a tougher and more flexible material. PLA is more rigid and breaks more easily. However, even with PETG, it will still break when it hits something really hard. Since this takes only 0.5m of material and 15 minutes to print, I will usually print a batch of nine at a time at very little cost. The blades that they sell do not break when it hits a hard object, but ...

3D Printer Filament Joiner

I have been looking at various ways of joining 3D printing filaments. One method involves running one end of a filament through a short PTFE tubing, melting it with a lighter or candle, retracting it back into the tubing and immediately plunging the filament to be fused into the tubing: One problem with this method is that you can't really control the temperature at which you melt the filament, so you frequently end up with a brittle joint that breaks upon the slightest bend. Aliexpress even sells a contraption that works along the same line. As it uses a lighter or candle as well, it suffers from the same weakness. I am not even sure why you need a special contraption when a short PTFE tubing will work just as well. Another method involves using shrink tubing/aluminium foil, and a heat gun: But a heat gun is rather expensive, so I wanted to explore other alternatives. The candle + PTFE tubing method actually works quite well when you happen to melt it at the rig...

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