Are all-in one external hard drives really the way to go?

[AylmerQc]

I've bought a number of Lacie external HDD in the past to use as backup and storage of my home videos. One day, for a reason I can't recall, I opened up one of the enclosures and took out the hard drive then put it into my hard drive dock. I couldn't access the hard drive. I put the drive back in the Lacie and it worked ok. So, what it looks like, and maybe many others might know this but I didn't, is that the data stored is only readable when the drive is in the specific enclosure it was in originally. If the case or enclosure electronics fails, you will have a really hard time accessing your data. A local computer shop confirmed this. I have to take his word for it and what I've experienced. Since then, I only buy hard drives and use them with the aforementioned dock.
Your thoughts?

 

[krs]

I don't know about Lacie, but WD started to do this a while back.
Instead of the drive in an external being a standard SATA drive connected to a SATA to USB-3 bridge/converter, they interfaed the internal irectly to USB-3 to save a bit of cost.
When I found out about that I switched to Seagate externals for backup an storage which at the time still used standard SATA drives in their externals.
However, I don't know if that is still true today.

Over the years I had two external drives fail on me - turned out that in both cases the failure was the SATA - USB3 bridge, not the drive itself. I put those drives into a SATA USB3 enclosure and was back in business.