Looking for a Good External HD

Ok so i'm looking for at least a 6TB External Harddrive. I'd prefer 8TB if it's within my price range. I want a WD Black, but I can't afford that. I have $98

I found this one (I could spare a few more bucks if this looks to be a good one)

My experience with Western Digital & Seagate external drives, is that if one needs to be replaced, even within early warranty stage, they give you a refurbished drive as a replacement (at least they did for me). After receiving one & discovering this, I stopped buying them.

I know this info doesn’t help you with a specific drive that may be worthy of purchasing, but a buyer beware is important.

I do hear good things about LaCie

antspants said:

My experience with Western Digital & Seagate external drives, is that if one needs to be replaced, even within early warranty stage, they give you a refurbished drive as a replacement (at least they did for me). After receiving one & discovering this, I stopped buying them.

I know this info doesn’t help you with a specific drive that may be worthy of purchasing, but a buyer beware is important.

I do hear good things about LaCie

Click to expand...

Yeah I'm going to be doing a lot of research.

JAM83 said:

Yeah I'm going to be doing a lot of research.

Click to expand...

Yeah good Idea, Jam. The warranty clauses are a good thing to look at. The good ones aren’t that cheap, which I see you already discovered.

I’ve started making my own external SSD’s. Just buying an external case and drive separately. But I couldn’t afford a 6tb one, to be honest. I’m trying to save ATM. Maybe you could do the same with a HDD?

antspants said:

Yeah good Idea, Jam. The warranty clauses are a good thing to look at. The good ones aren’t that cheap, which I see you already discovered.

I’ve started making my own external SSD’s. But I couldn’t afford a 6tb one, to be honest. I’m trying to save ATM

Click to expand...

I probably could be ok with a 4TB or 5TB for a while. I haven't done a lot of downloading lately anyway. The 3TB that I'm currently using has like 120GB left. . LOL

Western Digital 6TB Elements Desktop $129.99

MisterEd said:

Western Digital 6TB Elements Desktop $129.99

https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Desktop-Hard-Drive-WDBWLG0060HBK-NESN/dp/B076MPMZDV

Click to expand...

yeah i came across that one. . That's a bit out of my price range.

JAM83 said:

I probably could be ok with a 4TB or 5TB for a while. I haven't done a lot of downloading lately anyway. The 3TB that I'm currently using has like 120GB left. . LOL

Click to expand...

I also have that problem, regardless that I have drives coming out of my kaboodle (whatever that is)

Is there any particular reason it needs to be an external? I know they’re very practical. Are you out of SATA inputs?

antspants said:

My experience with Western Digital & Seagate external drives, is that if one needs to be replaced, even within early warranty stage, they give you a refurbished drive as a replacement (at least they did for me). After receiving one & discovering this, I stopped buying them.

I know this info doesn’t help you with a specific drive that may be worthy of purchasing, but a buyer beware is important.

I do hear good things about LaCie

Click to expand...

I don't know whether it's universal, but I expect that all warranty replacements will be refurbs, from all manufacturers.

I've never gotten a warranty replacement for a hard drive. The only drive I've had fail was a 750GB HDD in an external enclosure. I dropped it maybe 0.5m (20") while it was spun up. It was completely unreadable.

I like buying a bare drive and an external enclosure. It usually costs more, but then I know what I'm getting. So far, I've avoided SMR (shingled) drives, which have low cost (and low performance for some applications).

A quick look at Newegg suggests that no drives 4TB or larger will sell for less than $100US.

@JAM83


Save up your shekels and get this one...

SSDs have dropped a lot in prices the last year. Don't expect hard drives to do the same any time soon. In fact they may slowly increase in prices as more and more people switch to SSDs.

bobkn said:

I like buying a bare drive and an external enclosure. It usually costs more, but then I know what I'm getting.

Click to expand...

This is now my practice also. I feel a lot more confident… at least to date.

MisterEd said:

SSDs have dropped a lot in prices the last year. Don't expect hard drives to do the same any time soon. In fact they may slowly increase in prices as more and more people switch to SSDs.

Click to expand...

I agree with that.

antspants said:

Is there any particular reason it needs to be an external? I know they’re very practical. Are you out of SATA inputs?

Click to expand...

I want to connect it to my router so I can pull up movies and TV Shows on other devices (Set up a plex server)

WD 5TB Elements Portable HDD, External Hard Drive, USB 3.0 for PC & Mac, Plug and Play Ready - WDBU6Y0050BBK-WESN $103.72

JAM83 said:

I want to connect it to my router so I can pull up movies and TV Shows on other devices (Set up a plex server)

Click to expand...

Let me know how you go with that. I have had no luck doing it with my Asus router. It detects the drive…
I just run Plex from my internal HDD. It just means my PC has to stay on whilst others/devices are connecting, obviously.

antspants said:

Let me know how you go with that. I have had no luck doing it with my Asus router. It detects the drive…
I just run Plex from my internal HDD. It just means my PC has to stay on whilst others/devices are connecting, obviously.

Asus Ai-Disk files disappear on refresh

Halo. Thanks again for your patience. I have always failed at anything to do with Networking. I have an Asus DSL-AX82U. I thought I'd give an external drive attached to the router a go because I am sick of copying files to a USB stick and walking it all over the house from PC to PC (Computer...

www.elevenforum.com

Click to expand...

I have a Netgear Router, and I've done it before just to test it. . . IF for whatever reason it doesn't work, I'll connect it to my computer, and MAP Network Drive it places. . Then I'll set up Plex on my Android Boxes (Onn Android Box & Nvidia Shield) and work it that way. . lol There's always a way

I had a WDC Elements some years ago but found the WDC My Book has served me better, have 2 x 4TB 3.5" drives with their own power connected USB 3 to Win11 Desktop. For portability I use a WDC My Passport 1TB, fits in a pocket, has a 2.5" HDD in it, powered from the USB 3. I also have some cases for the 2.5" drives I've salvaged, most are single-cable USB 3 but have 1 for USB 2 that uses a Y-cable for data and extra power. For access from any computer I can Map a NAS drive on my Router with 2 x 2TB drives set as RAID 1 for 2TB total space.

One caveat I encountered, the 4TB drives packages were marked as for PC and Macintosh, since I no longer have a Mac I wiped them then formatted as NTFS. The only times I had an external drive fail, and an older NAS drive, it was the interface in the case that failed, drives were still good but data lost, couldn't be read. I reformatted in a drive dock and used to store backups.

When checking the Properties of the drives the format will show as what the computer uses, PC/Windows as NTFS, Mac OS X as HPFS and on the older ones connected to Linux as ext4.