What is being referred to here is that there's a trend of what is called "shucking", which means buying external drives which can sometimes be found for really good deals, for the purpose of taking apart the casing and using the drive inside as an internal drive. Some units are not shuckable, which means that they can't be used except in the external unit as intended. Some prefer to have that capability because, should the drive fail/run into issues, they can then have the option of taking the casing apart and using the drive as an internal to access the data. It should be noted that consistently across the industry, this will typically void your warranty. To be clear, we aren't trying to villify anyone, just stating there are tradeoffs.
We strongly advocate 2 rules when it comes to any hard drive to ensure both reliability and performance:
1. Use the drive for the purpose for which it was intended. You wouldn't take a semi-truck to a NASCAR race and then complain it was crappy because you couldn't win races.
2. Always, always back up your data vigilantly.
No differently than Apple soldering RAM and SSDs, it's your company and obviously your call...but, with an external with a soldered bridge, should the bridge/controller fail (or the USB port be damaged, which isn't that unusual with inferior and delicate legacy USB connectors [praise be to USB-C to address this]), it can render a perfectly good drive useless, creating more environmental waste, causing the end-User greater inconvenience, and costing them more money. Further, the warranty periods on externals are, almost completely across the board, shorter than the warranty on bare drives. To your credit, you offer extremely high-capacity, affordable 2.5 inch drives that perform well and are capable of meeting a wide range of uses - and you are unquestionably the industry leader when it comes to pushing the limits on ultra high-capacity 2.5-inch drives.
But Toshiba, Western Digital, and Seagate all make it:
A) difficult to determine whether a particular external hard drive has a soldered SATA bridge or not (many of your [and WD/Toshiba] enclosures are difficult-to-impossible to disassemble without enclosure damage, and, as you noted, disassembly voids the warranty-which I honestly find a little silly.) When most consumers are informed of this upon having one of these style externals malfunction, their reactions I have observed have ranged from annoyed to infuriated that such information was not more readily available (mind you, many of them kept only one copy of their files [which was a mistake they made given all drives can and eventually will fail], and some of that anger was related to hearing the pricing of hardware data recovery.)
B) difficult to determine what internal drive is being used with your external enclosures - for example, does Seagate use the
proven, liked, and trusted Barracuda 2.5 in your external drives?...or do you use a lower tier drive? (Sometimes even SMART metrics are insufficient to determine what exact drive model/tier is used on some pre-fab externals.)
While I can certainly recommend your bare internal drive + a good enclosure, or a WD internal drive + a good enclosure, I have a hard time recommending your external 2.5-inch drives, or WD's 2.5-inch external drives, to anyone given I do not personally feel that accepting the limitations and lack of readily available information justifies the price-savings.
