How To Open a Seagate Expansion Drive Case Without Destroying It.
How to Open the case of the Seagate Expansion External Hard Drive.
Took Kit: https://amzn.to/465uVBI
Smaller tool kit: https://amzn.to/4623BUS
The Drive: https://amzn.to/4eZaj21
This drive doesnt have any visible screws so the only way to open it is to pry open the case. You can do this without breaking it and youll still be able to reuse the drives inside, or the case with a different drive and the case will snap shut effectively.
So you’ve got yourself a Seagate Expansion Drive and you want to get into this bad boy.
Whatever the reason - you’ve no doubt ended up here because there are no screws on this thing and youre hoping theres a little trick that won’t involve cutting this thing open and destroying everything in your path.
Maybe the drive died but you want to use the case with another drive, maybe you broke off the USB plug end in the case but you want to get the drive out of there. Maybe youre building a NAS like me and just want bare drives to put into a NEW case..
Well Ive got good news for you, friend - there is a way in, and I will show it to you now.
If you’ve got one of these iFixit tool kits - unroll that wonderful vinyl sleeve and grab the slidy knify paddle tool.
Looking at your seagate drive, if youre over the age of 35, put on some reading glasses and notice that on one side there is a seam. A chink in the armor. Youre just going to press your knify tool into that crease and apply pressure, use the slightest of a sawing motion to pierce into that crevice, like in the movie Gladiator when the guy from Beautiful mind was about to fight the joker and Joaquin slipped his knife into the Russells back, or was it his leg..
Anyway, just above where the power light indicator is, you can jab your sharp tool right in there and sort of bend and twist and push until you hear and feel a pop.
Next, grab the fixit dental tool and with the gap you’ve opened up, force that dull spear into the opening. Using this tool as a lever, you can pry up until a tiny section of the lid releases its hold and pops up. Now youre really making progress, you should be proud of yourself. Just keep sliding that tiny crow bar along the edge of the lid piece thats starting to come off.
You’ve done it! Youre in! This is KIND of broken now, this wasn’t designed to be user serviced - however, you’ll notice that if you ARE planning to replace the drive in here and reuse this enclosure that it does still snap shut and stay shut. Added bonus that now its super easy to get open again.
What youre met with inside here is a little PCB thats held into the case with a single Philips screw and then taped to the board on the hard drive itself. Take out that screw and peel back that tape, and voila - you will be able to simply pull this drive and board out together.
The only thing holding this little triangular board onto the drive is its SATA interface so you can just grab it and gently tug it off.
And actually, you dont need this whole enclosure at all - THIS little thing is the entire external drive controller. So you can just plug that same power adapter into this, plug that same USB micro b cord into it (thats what this funny plug is called). And then slide this on to ANY SATA hard drive or solid state drive and leave it bare for that hacker vibe. Your drives are sealed so exposing this to the dust in your room wont be any sort of big deal.
You can use this to turn one of these little internal SSDs into a hot swappable external hard drive! How bout that.
But back on the drive that came in the enclosure - if your planning to use this maybe installed into your PC - you can just yank off these blue bumpers, and then remove the screws under those and this is a bare drive just like any internal hard drive you would buy. Mine came with these barracuda drives, I had the 4TB version. Im going to use these in my new Sinology NAS drive so all of my computers can share it.
Thats it. Its over. We did it. Thank you. Goodbye. 0
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