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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