I am actively on lookout for cheapest 2.5” drives for my backups and it seems that cheapest way to get 2.5” sata drives is to buy external drives and loot the hard disk from it. Sadly some manufacturers don’t use sata drives in their external drives, so one has to be careful which drive to buy.

An easy way to get a good look on the current disk prices in to check diskprices.com and that’s how I found this drive. It is about 0.028 €/GB at the moment, which is pretty good price for 2.5” drive. Cheapest 3.5” drives are about 0.023 €/GB today (December 2017).

The drive arrived from Amazon.de with minimal fuss and just the right amount of accessories (a cable, minimal manual). I proceded to tear it open:

Teardown of the external drive

Plastic shell is not fastened with screws, so one can just pry it open with a screwdrive to expose the construction. I was please to see, that this drive uses a usb3-to-SATA bridge and has a standard SATA-connector in place. Otherwise the build quality seem adequate.

Closeup on the disk

The drive is a Seagate Barracuda ST4000LM024 and seems completely legit. Nice :)

Angled shot showing the SATA-interface present

As you can see, the SATA-interface is present. This drive is suitable for my zfs-pool.