Looking for a Good External HD

MisterEd said:

Wait a minute....I though the original purpose of his thread was to recommend a good external HD. Does larger cache make that much difference with an external drive? The same for the rotational speed. Is a 7200RPM much faster than a 5400RPM when used in an external drive?

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Yup. That's why I recommended the TOSHIBA N300 . The OP implied that they wanted to do some networking with the drive as well. I assumed that they wanted to run it from an external enclosure. Anyway, as the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water... Seems to me the OP has the selection limited to Western Digital mechanical drives and this is where I make my exit. Perhaps WD makes reliable CMR drives too. I just discovered that my 15 year old Velociraptors are CMR, which does not surprise me in the least. This article explains a lot:


"Selling an SMR drive in the WD Black line is an insult to the product. When Western Digital created its initial color-based branding, WD Black hard drives(Opens in a new window) were supposed to sit at the top of the stack, surpassed only by the Velociraptor family. Putting an SMR product in that stack is Western Digital's way of quietly acknowledging that hard drive performance is a dead letter category since SSDs became widespread."

Scannerman said:

Yup. That's why I recommended the TOSHIBA N300 . The OP implied that they wanted to do some networking with the drive as well. I assumed that they wanted to run it from an external enclosure. Anyway, as the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water... Seems to me the OP has the selection limited to Western Digital mechanical drives and this is where I make my exit. Perhaps WD makes reliable CMR drives too. I just discovered that my 15 year old Velociraptors are CMR, which does not surprise me in the least. This article explains a lot:

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/309730-western-digital-comes-clean-shares-which-hard-drives-use-smr

"Selling an SMR drive in the WD Black line is an insult to the product. When Western Digital created its initial color-based branding, WD Black hard drives(Opens in a new window) were supposed to sit at the top of the stack, surpassed only by the Velociraptor family. Putting an SMR product in that stack is Western Digital's way of quietly acknowledging that hard drive performance is a dead letter category since SSDs became widespread."

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Why are you picking on Western Digital? Every drive manufacture makes SMR drives. The problem is none of the manufactures volunteer that information. Like I said even a particular model external drive can have either a CMR or SMR depending upon when it was made.

List of known SMR drives

List of WD CMR and SMR hard drives (HDD)

It used to be just the smaller capacity drives that were usually SMR. Over time even some of the larger drives are starting to be SMR. That information has only been determined by drive owners.

All the users of hard drives want is for manufactures to come clean and specify which drives are SMR and which are CMR. Then let us decide which ones we want to buy. Even if CMR drives are more expensive many buyers would be willing to pay that premium.

Whether every drive manufacturer makes SMR drives or not is immaterial. Perhaps I should stop making excuses for Western Digital and stop trying to figure out why they fail so much. Why am I picking on Western Digital? Oh, I don't know. Perhaps it has something to do with their shoddy customer service. Perhaps it has something to do with their reluctance to stand behind their product while it's still under warranty. Perhaps it has something to do with my past 20 years of noticing that of all the failed hard drives I've had to replace for myself and for my clients Western Digital mechanical hard drives take the lead. As I stated to the effect earlier, people can argue about my opinion, but they can't dictate my experience.

There is a reason I put that link up. We were asked and I gave my opinion. It is my express opinion that today, Western Digital mechanical hard drives suck. I really do hope Western Digital makes every effort to prove me wrong. I would love to see their Caviar Blacks last as long as my 15 year old Western Digital Velociraptors have. I wouldn't mind seeing their customer support improve too. But none of this will be to my personal benefit because when the man from Western Digital told me on the telephone, "Okay, but only this once" he likely didn't know how right he was.

When someone asks what I recommend I'm going to strive to be honest and I'm going to base my recommendation on my personal experience. I am not going to suggest such-and-such just because I read something online about a product. Nonetheless those words that I quoted from that same article ring volumes with me: "Selling an SMR drive in the WD Black line is an insult to the product."

People want to buy Western Digital mechanical hard drives? Who am I to stop them? My opinion was asked for and I provided it.

MisterEd said:

I only have one 2TB Western Digital Black. I used to use it internally but removed it when I replaced it with an SSD. Now it is in an external enclosure. I tested it internally when it was in my desktop a couple years ago. I tested it externally with my laptop yesterday. Does that make any difference?

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It should because not sure about now but external interfaces are usually slower than internal interfaces because remember the other one is usually on the chipset on the motherboard while the external enclosure has a USB to ATA bridge. This question is more of curiousity, are the older versions of Crystal Disk Info better than the current 9.x version as I noticed everyone who posted used a older version.

For my external drives, it usually is connected to my DISH Hopper 3 Satellite DVR for external storage of recordings and what I noticed is I have 6 Western Digital My Passport Ultra 2TB 2.5" external drives all of the same model from I believe 2016 or so as the packaging still reads Windows 8
as well as 3.5" 2TB Internal drives either connected using a USB 3.0 Thermaltake Docking Station or a USB 3.0 to PATA/SATA cable. With all those drives, before the DVR shows the drive as connected, the LED the docking station or the external drives would blink for maybe 5 minutes until it is successfully connected. I also bought a Western Digital My Passport 2TB 2.5" external drive direct from WDC a week ago and this one says Windows 10+ and also 256 bit AES hardware encryption but the difference is this one only takes 1-2 seconds after plugging in before it's successfully connected. All the drives have 4 EXT3FS partitions as follows:


so obviously the detection time before it is connected has nothing to do with the spindle rate or the cache size so could it be that the USB to ATA bridge has been improved?

As far as the specs goes, this is what Crystal Disk Info shows for the 2016 model:


I noticed that WD on their website makes a something that is also a portable external HDD called the WD Black, maybe these would be using the WD Black internal drives but I also noticed it says the connector is Micro-B whatever that is and I couldn't find if there is a cable that connects from the Micro-B to USB or not.


As for what I said about Maxtor, there was a time when Maxtor was completely junk like the mid 1990s but apparently, they gotten better in the 2000s but even in the 2000s, Maxtor drives were cheaper in price for the same capacity but the issue was they ran hotter than their competitors did which increased the failure rates. Not sure if you were aware even IBM at one point had something called the DeathStar because of high failure rates of one specific model of the DeskStar which suffered a click of death which everyone who had one experienced such as the thread below:

Actually, Wikipedia mentions it better being 6 different models in the DeskStar 75GXP family in 2001 with different capacities all known to fail:

So a lot of times, every company can produce bad drives that had a high failure rate so when I was talking about Maxtor, I was talking about the 1990s and maybe the early 2000s and not after that time.

I also ran both BBSes and also ran networks and servers on the internet for different companies and organizations back then since I was 10 years old until college so I also was up to date on pretty much all news on both hardware and software. Ofcourse I haven't kept up to date after 2009 as I visit a lot less sites after that so I can't even tell what the good products currently are like motherboards, cpus, etc.

bikemanI7 said:

Maybe can tell with Crystaldiskinfo the RPM speed of the WD My Passport drive, truthfully i haven't checked that yet though, but i will in a moment for one of my Passport drives here

Checks mine right now at least 1 of the drives if i find the cable to connect it to Desktop lol really quick here




(Disconnected when not in use)

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Yes, it does show. Thanks everyone for mentioning Crystal Disk Info either directly or indirectly. LOL. I guess my question is finding out what drives are used inside for comparison purposes before buying since I just want the one with the better performing specs whether it is spindle rate and/or cache size like if Seagate and WDC both had 2.5" 2TB drives, I would want the better one. As far as RPM goes, my WDC My Passport Ultra from 2016 I believe also shows 5200RPM but I wonder how accurate the data is since Western Digital specs for the model of the internal drive shows 5400RPM unless ofcourse WDC is showing better specs than reality.

Winuser said:

If you have to download anywhere near 6TBs of data you're going to be awhile.

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I just got another one for cheap, so I'll have it has a backup drive for things. . . I've got Two 6TB HDDs on the way now.

Porthos said:

No refund policy or warranty will replace the lost data after failure.

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Maybe that's the reason that when I visited the WD website yesterday for example, they seem to also sell a data recovery plan similar to how people used to sell extended warranties like this for example where it says Help Protect your content... I once had a 14.1GB HDD failed in 1997-1998 which was the biggest capacity and fastest available for 2.5" drives and it failed so bad that no data recovery company can get any data out of it and while they may all claim to have a 94% success rate for data recovery, I must be one of the unlucky 6% being unsuccessful.

pparks1 said:

For getting specs and stuff, I usually just check on review sites to see how the drives benchmark. At the end of day for myself, an external drive is for additional storage and backup purposes. Performance of the drive itself, really isn't a major concern to me. Whether it transfers at 138MB/sec or 144MB/sec isn't going to make it or break it for me.

Now, if it's the difference between and external mechanical hard drive and an SSD drive, i would put more thought into performance and it's purpose there. Case in point, i had an external HDD for my Mac as a backup drive using TimeMachine. It got the job done, but with a large number of changes, it took quite a while to evaluate what was on the drive, versus the system and then start the backup. I replaced that external HDD with an external SSD and the difference with Time Machine is night and day. Best upgrade I ever made with respect to my Mac. But for something like my Macrium PC images.....no SSD for me there, my handy dandy 8TB 3.5" WD Elements drive has been absolutely fantastic. Eventually I'll upgrade for more space. Been looking at 16TB WD's.

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That's true but the problem is Western Digital doesn't change the name of their product as the same product 5 years ago like My Passport, My Passport Ultra and Elements which had a 2TB model in 2016 and possibility earlier and also a model with the same name now which is actually a newer model. All three product lines for the same given year have have the same internal drive model inside. And it does make a big difference as I mentioned above, I have mines connected to a DISH Hopper 3 Satellite TV DVR for external storage. The older model takes 5+ minutes in the detection before it's connected, the newer model that is sold takes 1-2 seconds. The other difference is you can only transfer recordings to/from it and watch recordings on it but not directly record to it so if it is transferring, I cannot add recordings to the transfer or even watch content on that drive until the transfer is over. The older model for 2 recordings that is 1.5hrs each in SD, not sure the GB size would take 10+ minutes, the newer model takes 4-5 minutes because the progress bar seems to move faster as in the % completed so in my case, it does matter.

The device supports a total of 7.1TB on 1-3 total external HDDs and there is a reason I am using only 2TB because even if I were to put in a single drive, the device will only show a maximum of 999 recordings per external HDD so if I had anything over 999, then one has to wonder how it decides on which recordings to show in that 999 so you can't even delete things outside of the 999. The 999 recording limit was something I learned only 2 weeks ago because some other DISH user experienced the problem on a 3TB drive that had way more than 999 recordings and wonder why they couldn't see all the recordings.

JAM83 said:

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)

https://www.amazon.com/Passport-Portable-External-Drive-Black/dp/B07VP5X239/ref=sr_1_29?crid=NQAALK9QWLMM&keywords=WD_BLACK%2B6TB&qid=1694815585&s=electronics&sprefix=wd_black%2B6tb%2Celectronics%2C117&sr=1-29&th=1

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You didnt say so I must ask, Did you want a regular HD external drive or a Portable drive?

imanlien2020 said:

You didnt say so I must ask, Did you want a regular HD external drive or a Portable drive?

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I wanted a regular HD External Drive. I was looking at the Seagate Expansion 6TB Just can't get it at the moment.

JAM83 said:

I wanted a regular HD External Drive. I was looking at the Seagate Expansion 6TB Just can't get it at the moment.

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If you simply want a regular (mechanical) External Drive I recommend getting a separate enclosure. You'll spare yourself from needless bloatware and should the drive fail at least you'll have an enclosure handy to replace the drive with a new one. I'm not criticizing your selection. In fact, I own a few of those drives myself and the only issue that they gave me was software related. I had to completely clean Seagate's garbage off them to stop them from "thinking" they needed to reformat every time they encountered a corrupt file.





The drives in this picture are my Seagate Backup + drives and are a bit smaller than the 6TB unit you're looking at. Admittedly, they have served me well for years, hence the "WHOLESALE RESCUE" labels. The smaller capacity unit comes with a HUB which I find very handy at times. Nonetheless, I feel compelled to encourage you to save your fiat and go with a Toshiba N300 (CMR drive) in an external enclosure as it is my understanding that you also intend to do some networking with your new toy.

It goes without saying that used drives are a gamble and generally the warranty (if any) is dubious. I'm not saying that you can't get reliable drives this way as I've done it, but you're better off getting one from a professional refurbishing company that offers a warranty with the drive. Of course, this is all entirely your own decision. When purchasing used you're definitely dealing with the good, the bad, and the downright oglee.

As one who has had extensive experience with numerous brands, makes, models of hard drives and various configurations, I like to think that I know from whence I speak on the matter. Indubitably, there are some here with more 'hands on' experience than me in this department and they might just tell you otherwise. Despite these SB+ drives being SMR drives I will maintain that you are better off using a CMR drive if you intend to home network or, happen to desire to do something more with the drive in the future.

I can only offer what I know based on my personal experience with hard drives over these past 20 some odd years. There are some here that have been at it for 30 and 40 years. In nowise do I disregard their experience and knowledge. There are some who get accustomed to using one brand and stick with it. As a PC builder and computer repair guy I don't have the option of sticking to one or two brands. I have to stay flexible, but I also need to keep it real. My best advice is to keep saving, buy new, avoid Sabrent enclosures, and opt for CMR drives.

A enclosure may or may not be needed as you can choose the bare drive which is the best way to buy and knowing exactly the actual specs of the drive and then you can use either an enclosure, an docking station or a USB 3.0 to HDD cable. I have the later two which will basically take anything you throw at it while the enclosure needs to be the same size or bigger than the drive physically, the later is so you can use adapters when using a smaller.

Scannerman said:

If you simply want a regular (mechanical) External Drive I recommend getting a separate enclosure. You'll spare yourself from needless bloatware and should the drive fail at least you'll have an enclosure handy to replace the drive with a new one. I'm not criticizing your selection. In fact, I own a few of those drives myself and the only issue that they gave me was software related. I had to completely clean Seagate's garbage off them to stop them from "thinking" they needed to reformat every time they encountered a corrupt file.


View attachment 71996


The drives in this picture are my Seagate Backup + drives and are a bit smaller than the 6TB unit you're looking at. Admittedly, they have served me well for years, hence the "WHOLESALE RESCUE" labels. The smaller capacity unit comes with a HUB which I find very handy at times. Nonetheless, I feel compelled to encourage you to save your fiat and go with a Toshiba N300 (CMR drive) in an external enclosure as it is my understanding that you also intend to do some networking with your new toy.

It goes without saying that used drives are a gamble and generally the warranty (if any) is dubious. I'm not saying that you can't get reliable drives this way as I've done it, but you're better off getting one from a professional refurbishing company that offers a warranty with the drive. Of course, this is all entirely your own decision. When purchasing used you're definitely dealing with the good, the bad, and the downright oglee.

As one who has had extensive experience with numerous brands, makes, models of hard drives and various configurations, I like to think that I know from whence I speak on the matter. Indubitably, there are some here with more 'hands on' experience than me in this department and they might just tell you otherwise. Despite these SB+ drives being SMR drives I will maintain that you are better off using a CMR drive if you intend to home network or, happen to desire to do something more with the drive in the future.

I can only offer what I know based on my personal experience with hard drives over these past 20 some odd years. There are some here that have been at it for 30 and 40 years. In nowise do I disregard their experience and knowledge. There are some who get accustomed to using one brand and stick with it. As a PC builder and computer repair guy I don't have the option of sticking to one or two brands. I have to stay flexible, but I also need to keep it real. My best advice is to keep saving, buy new, avoid Sabrent enclosures, and opt for CMR drives.

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Yeah I've got an Orico 3.5" Enclosure waiting for me to pop in the HDD once I get it. I've got two 6TB HDDs on the way. . One, I will pop into the enclosure and use normally. The other, I'm going to put inside the computer and use it as an Internal Backup or I could do the complete opposite. What do you suggest? Use external as backup?

JAM83 said:

Yeah I've got an Orico 3.5" Enclosure waiting for me to pop in the HDD once I get it. I've got two 6TB HDDs on the way. . One, I will pop into the enclosure and use normally. The other, I'm going to put inside the computer and use it as an Internal Backup or I could do the complete opposite. What do you suggest? Use external as backup?

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Nicely done. I suggest using the Orico for making a complete, functional clone of your OS on a compatible drive, removing the clone and then using the Orico for an external backup on one of those 6TB drives. Tuck the clone in a nice, dry, dark place where you know it will be safe after you label it. Microsoft recommends that external hard drives be used for backups but you can do both. Another thing you can do is make a short cut to your desk top to the internal drive and label it "Archives". You can drag and drop copies of your more valuable files and media to this so that even in the event that your backup fails most of your valuable data will still be accessed in your Archives. My wife uses this method and she practically never loses data this way. As an added measure her Archives are in RAID1. About a year ago one of the drives cratered. I just pulled the drive and popped in a drive of equal capacity and her RAID1 rebuilt itself. She didn't lose a single file.

Looks like you got a break and I'm glad to hear it. Have fun!

Scannerman said:

Nicely done. I suggest using the Orico for making a complete, functional clone of your OS on a compatible drive, removing the clone and then using the Orico for an external backup on one of those 6TB drives. Tuck the clone in a nice, dry, dark place where you know it will be safe after you label it. Microsoft recommends that external hard drives be used for backups but you can do both. Another thing you can do is make a short cut to your desk top to the internal drive and label it "Archives". You can drag and drop copies of your more valuable files and media to this so that even in the event that your backup fails most of your valuable data will still be accessed in your Archives. My wife uses this method and she practically never loses data this way. As an added measure her Archives are in RAID1. About a year ago one of the drives cratered. I just pulled the drive and popped in a drive of equal capacity and her RAID1 rebuilt itself. She didn't lose a single file.

Looks like you got a break and I'm glad to hear it. Have fun!

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What I want to do is do a complete 100% clean install. Uninstall all the bloatware. Disable crap like Defender (I use Malwarebytes). Disable UAC, and do all that jazz. Install Firefox, and a few other small things. THEN create my own custom Recovery Partition Tutorial Here. It works with Windows 11. (I tried it a year or 2 ago, testing it out for @Brink! That way All I will have to do is pop in the Recovery USB Drive, OR put it on one of the external drives (whichever I choose), and it'll be ready for clean installs later down the road.

Scannerman said:

Nicely done. I suggest using the Orico for making a complete, functional clone of your OS on a compatible drive, removing the clone and then using the Orico for an external backup on one of those 6TB drives. Tuck the clone in a nice, dry, dark place where you know it will be safe after you label it. Microsoft recommends that external hard drives be used for backups but you can do both. Another thing you can do is make a short cut to your desk top to the internal drive and label it "Archives". You can drag and drop copies of your more valuable files and media to this so that even in the event that your backup fails most of your valuable data will still be accessed in your Archives. My wife uses this method and she practically never loses data this way. As an added measure her Archives are in RAID1. About a year ago one of the drives cratered. I just pulled the drive and popped in a drive of equal capacity and her RAID1 rebuilt itself. She didn't lose a single file.

Looks like you got a break and I'm glad to hear it. Have fun!

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RAID1 is where you have 2 drives, and it automatically copies itself from the main drive to the other, correct? And I can set that up in Disk Management?

JAM83 said:

RAID1 is where you have 2 drives, and it automatically copies itself from the main drive to the other, correct? And I can set that up in Disk Management?

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Yes, RAID1 is mirroring. I'm not sure you can set it up from Disk Management in Windows 11. My guess is probably not. Depending on whether you want to use hardware RAID or soft RAID you can use software to configure your drives for RAID. Both Intel and AMD provide apps for this. There are also plenty of instructional videos on YouTube that can walk you through the process. With mechanical drives it's fairly easy. NVMe uses bifibumalaetectrocution for RAID 0. Probably not something for the novice. Mirroring is simple, but you still have to configure your UEFI for RAID before you begin and if you didn't install your OS after configuring your "BIOS" for RAID there's a good chance you'll lose your boot strap. My advice is to do some research first, watch some videos, and then decide if you really need it. Most folks don't. It's really a matter of user preference.

Scannerman said:

If you simply want a regular (mechanical) External Drive I recommend getting a separate enclosure. You'll spare yourself from needless bloatware and should the drive fail at least you'll have an enclosure handy to replace the drive with a new one. I'm not criticizing your selection. In fact, I own a few of those drives myself and the only issue that they gave me was software related. I had to completely clean Seagate's garbage off them to stop them from "thinking" they needed to reformat every time they encountered a corrupt file.

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I have several external drives from both Seagate and Western Digital that I bought over the last 6 years. None of them had bloatware on then. They did have a folder with some kind of software in it. The first thing I did was delete those folders. Are they putting bloatware other than that on the external drives now?

MisterEd said:

I have several external drives from both Seagate and Western Digital that I bought over the last 6 years. None of them had bloatware on then. They did have a folder with some kind of software in it. The first thing I did was delete those folders. Are they putting bloatware other than that on the external drives now?

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I sure hope not. That folder with the software is likely the "bloatware" I was referring to and yes, I eventually did the same thing as you, but the kid in me just had to play around with the software first, before I concluded that it was a waste of time and resources. I had better use for the extra space.

JAM83 said:

RAID1 is where you have 2 drives, and it automatically copies itself from the main drive to the other, correct? And I can set that up in Disk Management?

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Yes, RAID 1 is 2 drives, one is a mirror copy of the other. RAID 0 is 2 drives doubling the capacity called striping, parts of files are spread between the 2 drives but if one drive goes bad all the data is lost.

As for Western Digital, I haven't lost an actual drive but did lose the interface in the external case on a few. I had 2 x 1TB WD NAS drives on my network, replaced them because of security issues which was too far out of date. My experience with HDDs began 30+years ago with Maxtor and Connor in MB/MegaByte sizes over 100MB.