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8TB External Western Digital HDD for $160 @ Best Buy (Perfect for NAS!)

B

BeardyChan

Member
Be warned HGST whites have been found in some of these and they are soldered boards meaning they can not be used for shucking. Use CrystalDiskInfo to check your drive before shucking.
 
M

Marty Chinn

Member
BeardyChan said:
Be warned HGST whites have been found in some of these and they are soldered boards meaning they can not be used for shucking. Use CrystalDiskInfo to check your drive before shucking.
Click to expand...

Aren't the HGST drives in the 8TB MyBook drives and not the 8TB Easy Share drives? Definitely verify before you open, but I haven't read anyone getting anything but Red drives. Any links to people getting HGST drives?
 
H

Hesh

Member
Wait, Reds are good now? I used to see so many negative reviews for Red WD's on Newegg over the years that I pretty much would only get a Black when they're on sale.
 
M

Marty Chinn

Member
Hesh said:
Wait, Reds are good now? I used to see so many negative reviews for Red WD's on Newegg over the years that I pretty much would only get a Black when they're on sale.
Click to expand...

Reds have always been a solid safe choice for NAS usage. Of course Black drives are the cream of the crop, but Reds are still good.
 
M

mrklaw

MrArseFace
US only, but anyway I expect my HP micro server might not support that size on unraid. Running 5x2TB at the moment but that’ll probably be full by the end of the year
 
B

BeardyChan

Member
Marty Chinn said:
Aren't the HGST drives in the 8TB MyBook drives and not the 8TB Easy Share drives? Definitely verify before you open, but I haven't read anyone getting anything but Red drives. Any links to people getting HGST drives?
Click to expand...

You're right seems it was the MyBooks. My bad about that, regardless it's always best to be safe.

Ended up getting 2 more to finally get my NAS build going. Now I just need to settle on a software to install to run it. I had issues with FreeNas not installing right due to KabyLake and my motherboard.
 
U

uncelestial

Member
Just be sure to either get two and do a redundant RAID or use a cloud backup system like CrashPlan, because those external WD drives go bad all the time.
 
M

Marty Chinn

Member
spazchicken said:
Can somebody translate this to English please?
Click to expand...

He was mistakenly saying that there might be a HGST drive in there instead of a WD Red drive. If it's the HGST drive, it's designed in a way that it can't be removed from the case to use as an internal drive, so it's useless to remove the case. Fortunately, he was referring to a different external hard drive and not the one I listed in the OP. To be safe though, use CrystalDiskInfo to check which drive it is before you remove the case.
 
T

toneroni

Member
Thanks for the heads up. Good time to upgrade my 2x2TB synology setup! Never heard that WD external reds were worse than retail - any additional info on that?
 
N

Ninja Dom

Member
HjpwyQU.gif


Sorry, had to.
 
andythinkpad

andythinkpad

Member
You put a EXT drive in your NAS you lost your warranty.

I don't use drives with shorter than 3 year warranty nowadays.

BTW EXT drivers are lower quality than INT drivers, that's why you can always find EXT drive of the same capacity in lower price.

If I get this drive, I wouldn't setup NAS with it. I would just use software like always sync to backup shit monthly like it's designed to do.
 
M

Marty Chinn

Member
andythinkpad said:
You put a EXT drive in your NAS you lost your warranty.

I don't even use driver with shorter than 3 year warranty nowadays.
Click to expand...

That's why you keep the case so you can put it back in if anything goes wrong. Plus at $100+ price difference, it's probably worth the extra risk. I'm returning two HGST 7200 NAS drives because the extra $160 is the price of one of these drives.

BTW EXT drivers are lower quality than INT drivers, that's why you can always find EXT drive of the same capacity in lower price.

If I get this drive, I wouldn't setup NAS with it. I would just use software like always sync to backup shit monthly like it's designed to do.
Click to expand...

Has it been shown there's a difference in these Red drives though compared to the Red drives you would buy as internal?

They're the same price normally but come with a shorter warranty. The extra warranty usually costs more too.
 
B

boredandlazy

Member
Marty Chinn said:
I always thought Enterprise drives were good in servers. Is that not the case?
Click to expand...

Blacks are Enterprise?

Blacks have higher performance (7200rpm etc.) but lack some of the features of Reds like Vibration Protection which is handy when running a large number of drives in a NAS.
Blacks are also louder, which means if you have 8 of them running in a NAS they will produce a fair bit more noise than Reds.
 
M

Marty Chinn

Member
boredandlazy said:
Blacks are Enterprise?

Blacks have higher performance (7200rpm etc.) but lack some of the features of Reds like Vibration Protection which is handy when running a large number of drives in a NAS.
Blacks are also louder, which means if you have 8 of them running in a NAS they will produce a fair bit more noise than Reds.
Click to expand...

Are they not? I have one of these and it's most definitely an Enterprise drive:

G01-0747-2.jpg


Did they change the color scheme?

Napoleonthechimp said:
Reds have a longer lifespan and with their firmware are designed for NAS usage.
Click to expand...

I thought Enterprise drives were meant for data centers/servers. Why wouldn't they be good in a NAS? Isn't a data center/server essentially a much more robust NAS to put it loosely?
 
B

boredandlazy

Member
Marty Chinn said:
Are they not? I have one of these and it's most definitely an Enterprise drive:

G01-0747-2.jpg


Did they change the color scheme?



I thought Enterprise drives were meant for data centers/servers. Why wouldn't they be good in a NAS? Isn't a data center/server essentially a much more robust NAS to put it loosely?
Click to expand...

Those SE drives have black colouring, but aren't WD Black drives. :p

All the different drive types are explained here:

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Understanding-the-WD-Rainbow-674/

Edit: The SE drives are yellow on that page... :p
I have 2 WD Data Centre 10TB drives in my PC, they're yellow in colour too...
 
N

Napoleonthechimp

Member
Marty Chinn said:
Are they not? I have one of these and it's most definitely an Enterprise drive:

G01-0747-2.jpg


Did they change the color scheme?



I thought Enterprise drives were meant for data centers/servers. Why wouldn't they be good in a NAS? Isn't a data center/server essentially a much more robust NAS to put it loosely?
Click to expand...

WD have spec sheets available if you want to check but keep in mind they have WD Red and Red Pro drives, with the latter having a much higher performance with bigger power draw and heat generation. However the Red drives have double the load/unload cycles when compared with the Black drives.
 
M

Marty Chinn

Member
boredandlazy said:
Those SE drives have black colouring, but aren't WD Black drives. :p

All the different drive types are explained here:

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Understanding-the-WD-Rainbow-674/

Edit: The SE drives are yellow on that page... :p
I have 2 WD Data Centre 10TB drives in my PC, they're yellow in colour too...
Click to expand...

Yellow didn't exist back when I bought this drive. So the whole color scheme has changed since I first got it. That was the last time I bought an Enterprise drive since they're so expensive comparatively but I got such a killer deal on it that it was less than the price of a Red that I couldn't pass it up at the time. They've changed the color scheme considerably since then.
 
andythinkpad

andythinkpad

Member
Marty Chinn said:
That's why you keep the case so you can put it back in if anything goes wrong. Plus at $100+ price difference, it's probably worth the extra risk. I'm returning two HGST 7200 NAS drives because the extra $160 is the price of one of these drives.



Has it been shown there's a difference in these Red drives though compared to the Red drives you would buy as internal?

They're the same price normally but come with a shorter warranty. The extra warranty usually costs more too.
Click to expand...

The point of the warranty is you get a free replacement if your drive dies within 3 year. HDD always dies, at a very consistant rate.

I get rid of my drives before the warranty is up. I let the next sucker deal with the HDD fail rate.
 
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