I keep a Lenovo ThinkCentre SFF with Windows 10 on it because I have email and a few other things for one specific client on it. Most every other company on the planet has abandoned Microsoft products, but this one still uses them. Having come up in IT through operations back when we had actual computer rooms with actual computers in them, I’m a firm believer in bare metal backups. I use Image for Linux on my Linux machines and Image for Windows on my Windows 10 machine. I have a lot of external drive enclosures that I let systems backup automatically to. In fact, you’ve seen me write about external drives before.

Pre-Packaged External Drives
Lately I’ve started buying the Seagate pre-packaged ones, but for years I put my own drives in. It wasn’t until about the last six years that pre-packaged external drives got “good enough” to buy. Drives failed much more often. Even just sitting on a desk never being moved drives would fail faster in the enclosures due to heat. If those things had a fan it was inadequate at best. Higher volume fans made noise so people returned the products.
Drive Shucking
Most of the pre-packaged drives usually had something custom in the enclosure that made it difficult to replace the drive. Some of this had to do with the steaming piles of excrement on eBay, Amazon, and a few other on-line cesspits of humanity. They would engage in Drive Shucking.
There are three main forms of Drive Shucking:
- Sticking a much smaller usually close to failure drive into an enclosure you list as much larger for sale. (just a scam)
- Buying a new enclosure then sticking a dead drive of the same size in it and demanding a refund. (free drive scam)
- Sticking a very old drive in an enclosure you sell as “new.” The external enclosure may well be new, but the drive you stuck in it has had 5+ years of continuous use. (Honestly, you should be gang raped for doing this.)
You may have noticed that Seagate and Western Digital have changed pre-packaged drives to have plastic enclosures that won’t come apart without breaking or at least showing severe scratching. It is because of this that I have started buying pre-packaged drives from those brands.
Back to the Lenovo
Once every month or so I logged into it to apply updates that didn’t automatically apply and make certain the external drive wasn’t running out of space. It runs BOINC when I’m not using it. Basically I switch to it to see if all is well.
For a couple of weeks, logging in and any other thing I did on it was slow as Hell. We are talking minutes. Finally I decided to look into it when the Microsoft Solution to Everything (reboot) didn’t fix the problem. I couldn’t even get a bare metal backup started. In frustration I powered off and plugged the drive into my Debian 12 machine. Almost instantly I got a big red “Drive is likely to fail soon” on the screen.
Summary
Despite its Nanny-State origins, Windows 10 wasn’t polite enough to let me know the external drive was throwing off the S.M.A.R.T. “Drive is likely to fail soon” message. Shocking since Microsoft participated in the creation of S.M.A.R.T. standards. Debian 12 coughed it up right away.

I pitched the disk and hooked up a pre-packaged WD drive. I also surfed over to Newegg.com and ordered a 4TB internal drive to stick in the external case.