How to open a Western Digital Dual-Option USB Enclosure

The Western Digital Dual-Option USB enclosures are handy devices for carrying data (high throughput sneakernet) or just for making offline backups of your data.

Eventually you might realize that you're running low on capacity, or your drive might die. Western Digital would prefer that you just buy another USB drive, but I'd rather reuse the existing hardware, especially since I have a few larger PATA drives sitting around now. This instructable gives you a play by play on opening the enclosure without breaking it (well, hopefully you won't break it because I'll show you how).

Step 1 Remove the sides

This is the most difficult step and the one that is most likely to end in broken plastic.

Pry up the rear end of one of the long silver sides.

Slide the side toward the back of the drive. On my drive it was very difficult. I found that I was able to get things to move by standing the drive on one side and applying downward pressure on the side that I was trying to slide. This relieves some of the stress on the tabs that hold the side in place. Keep trying and be patient, or else you may end up with some broken tabs (like I did, on my first try).

Repeat for the other side.

Comments

[mareich]

Despite the age of this post, it helped me out today. I wasn't trying to install a new drive, but get a probably still functional hard drive out of a deceased enclosure. Sure enough, when I got the HDD out, put it into another enclosure, it spun up fine. Thanks for this great "how to."

[galtish]

Thanks for posting this, I had just about given up. Before I bother to crack it opne, will this enclosure accept a SATA drive? Also, you mention some little tabs that broke off, did it still go back together ok?

[improperintegral]

It's tricky to get it open, so I figured that should make for a decent instructable and you're very welcome. The tabs that broke off did not keep me from closing it up nicely. The one side plate is probably not as solid as it could be, but it's not easy to tell. If I were more careful, I wouldn't have broken them. It is a regular IDE connection inside, so SATA is out unless you have some kind of adapter.

[galtish]

Thanks for the quick reply. I'm guessing an adapter would be to big for the enclosure. Bummer.

[xboxteen01]

nice writeup. just an FYI to others, i used a WD backup drive and the included software copied my entire C: drive then put a copy of the Info to my HD and the WD drive. made a nice back up copy and at the same time took my 200 gb hd and left me with duplicates of all files giving me essentially 12gb of remaing space. so others be warned about that.

[improperintegral]

Hmm that doesn't sound like useful behavior for the backup software but that's probably a good tip for anyone using it. I happen to use my external drives on various Linux boxes, so I handle everything with rsync. I did actually write some software to handle the buttons on the front of the enclosures but haven't gotten around to integrating it nicely with gnome.

[xboxteen01]

Yea, i'm not sure why the software did it but it essentially destroyed the pc. It runs so slow and hot right now from lack of HD space that I ought to just wipe the drive and begin anew. Good luck with the Programming though, i could never really wrap my head around that. Tried C++ but there was too much math lol.