I had a portable hard drive fail, wouldn't show up as a disk to the computer but would show up on the USB bus. It's a drive I used to keep my GoPro footage on while traveling, and at home it became a backup drive.

Decided to open the plastic case to see if the drive would possibly show up over it's SATA interface, except, hrm, seems the drive is directly USB3. Overall the drive sounds like it's suffering a mechanical failure of some sort, and not really concerned about pulling data off.

Was somewhat surprised to see it have a USB3 micro connector directly attached. Gave me a bit of a flashback to some of the fibre channel drives in the SANs I used to work with.

Strange! I assume that's to save space and make the enclosure more compact?

I wonder when we'll start seeing USB C drives. There's flash drives, but I want more space.

Yeah, Western Digital sell so many USB-connected drives, that they got into manufacturing "native USB" drives years ago. I bumped into a few native USB2 drives at the time and had a similar reaction!

Cheers

Same here. Actually, my story is more disappointing. I was looking for an internal 3.5" HDD as the one in my laptop failed. I was far from the city and the only thing I could find was an external (boxed) WD hdd, which I happily bought with the precise intent to remove the case and put the HDD in my laptop.
Well, that's what I found inside it.

Ancient thread on this issue here. Just for interest.

Somewhat related, counterfeit drives are also pure USB...

https://twitter.com/sehnaoui/status/702584316333658112