The answer is yes, the obscenely cheap, giant drives marketed only for backup use can still be used as internal drives. Once you don't mind losing the warranty, they can be torn down & an ordinary SATA drive extracted. The lion kingdom risked $170 + $17 tax in an act of desperation because for the 1st time in 30 years of owning desktop hard drives, the hot weather seems to have damaged one. It was a good time to start moving the entire optical storage collection of 20 years to a hard drive. The lion kingdom had 2 other hard drive failures in Hitachi micro drives, but not root filesystems.  Japanese hard drives have proven the least reliable.

After much destruction, the goods slid out from the bottom to the top, in their own plastic assembly. The assembly was locked inside by tabs & had rubber shock absorbers.

The teardown also liberated a USB to SATA adapter & 12V 1.5A power brick. The USB adapter does the magic trick of spinning it down when inactive, without disconnecting it.

All USB drives are much cheaper than what are being sold as internal drives. Suspect the support & warranty costs are much higher when people install the bare drives.

The lion kingdom got into the habit of tacking on 2nd paw, small hard drives as needed. This creates a lot of heat & uses a lot of power. The 8TB should eventually replace all of them.