Can you shuck a drive BOTH before & after it has been written to?
Can you shuck a drive BOTH before & after it has been written to?
Specifically a WD Elements (22gb).
Thanks!
You can shuck it anyway, if you mean if you can access the data in the same way without the enclosure, with large/new drives, yes. There are some (older/much TB-smaller) enclosures which have encryption in the enclosure, and the content of the disk is actually encrypted all the time even you don't set a password (so you can flip the encryption on instantly) but here it isn't the case.
I did it and was surprised it worked because people told me it wouldn't. If I'd known that, it would've saved me a lot of copying and backupping.
people told me it wouldn't
It is beyond belief how misinformation gets propagated over Internet, at least here it's something more subtle, but it's really weird how people constantly come asking about 3.5" if they are shuckable at all (as in if the internal drive is "normal", not that they would want the data, they'd like to just shuck the drive from the start). What's more people even manage to gaslit themselves that somehow in the past they've had personally some 3.5" external with the USB directly on the PCB!
Except it's not always the case. I had a few WD Elements/Easystores that I had data on, shucked them, and couldn't read them in Windows. It wasn't encrypted, just something funky done with the partitioning and couldn't use it until I destroyed existing and created new partitions.
But it can't hurt to try it first, you should be able to throw it back in the enclosure to get access to the data, although good idea to have a backup anyhow.
Back in the days I did that, I had some issues with it being unreadable with my 3 end 4TB ones.
Something to do with it internally converting MBR in the USB to SATA controller or something like that to allow larger disks on older systems. I don't remember the specifics.
Anyway, it can be that your data becomes unreadable, and you'll have to convert it with TestDisk or so. Or make sure you'll initialize it as GPT from the first time. Not sure if that will help.
Generally the enclosures are just that, enclosures that offer the connection. There are exceptions though where enclosure does something more. Some enclosures do encryption and some just use the same controller for single drive and multidrive and your one drive is actually set up as a 1 drive raid array in which case you may have data slightly shifted to accomodate the headers for that. You can then still recreate everything, but it's a pain.
But as I said, generally they're just providing the drive as is in which case there won't be any issue.
Yes