What the shuck is our friend Brian Moses up to this week? He’s showing us how to disassemble a Western Digital Elements USB hard drive to retrieve the delicious SATA hard drive from inside!

Why would you want to do something like this? I don’t understand the economics, but even though external hard drives almost always contain the same sort of SATA hard disk, the external hard drives are often a lot cheaper, and they get deeply discounted quite often!

I’ve heard that the warranty is often shorter, but the Western Digital drive Brian shucked comes with a two-year warranty. I doubt that warranty is easy to claim if you’ve already disassembled the enclosure, though, and there’s always the risk that the drive inside the shell doesn’t have a SATA port or is made to be slightly incompatible with a real SATA connector.

I enjoy photography, but I’m rather boring. What I do on a day-to-day basis feels like basic product photography. I understand the technical things like shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. I understand depth of field, exposure, and motion blur. I am not artistic. I don’t feel like I understand composition or color.

This is why I watch Peter McKinnon’s videos. He does a great job of teaching me how to do a better job at the things I barely understand.

His recent video on flat lay photography feels like it is targeted right at me. I’m often tempted to write a What’s In My Bag blog. It might be about my laptop bag. It might be about my drone bag. It might be about my camera bag. In any case, it is going to require that I take a photograph of all the key components of the bag in a single shot.

I feel like I post a CNC video every single week. This week, I decided to go full manual! This week, I watched my mechanics machine a large bolt into a combination lock, and I was mesmerized the entire time.

His work is outstanding. His videography is amazing. Take fifteen minutes out of your day and watch this fantastic video!