Suggestions for a dependable storage drive

Meisha · Sunday at 8:58 PM

Ghot said:
I've owned/own about twenty of them.
They all still work flawlessly.

What size are you looking for? WD and Seagate are decent 3.5" drives.
Stay away from WD Blue or Green. I'm not 100% sure but the WD Ultrastars, used to be Hitachi DeskStars (DeathStars).
Western Digital acquired Hitachi's hard disk drive (HDD) business in 2012.

https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/#f=2&t=7200&A=2000000000000,36000000000000&sort=-a_capacity&m=34,38

I'm using these at the moment...

WD 4TB Black
M/N: WD4005FZBX

WD 8TB Black
M/N: WD8001FZBX

I'm looking for 8 to 12TB. I'll take a look at the 8TB you mentioned. Thanks!

Ghot · Sunday at 9:13 PM

Mine run about this fast...

0000 Crystal - WD Black 7200rpm FZBX.webp

MisterEd · Sunday at 9:37 PM

Have you given up on the WD My Book and WD Elements external drives? If so, then have your thought of "shucking" the drives. That means to remove the internal SATA drives from their enclosure. The only thing that may have failed was the internal SATA to USB board in the drive. The drive itself may be OK.

I have a 2TB Seagate Expansion Desktop external drive. The drive started being intermittent so I managed to copy all the data off of it before it finally failed. I shucked the drive and put it into an external enclosure. The internal drive was a 3.5-in Seagate Barracuda SATA HDD. Checking the drive showed it was encrypted so I couldn't read it. No matter because I already saved the data. I repartitioned and reformatted the drive. Testing it showed that it was good now. I copied the data back onto it.

Marie SWE · Sunday at 10:23 PM

Depending on how tech savvy you are, you can build your own NAS.
Desktop PC that has 6 or 8 SATA connectors.. perhaps has one or two m.2 slots.
Then you install a free OS.. there is several out there, but just one hits me in writing moment. TrueNas community edition... it was also know as FreeNas.

or just cheat.. set up windows on a Desktop PC and load it with so many Sata HDD's you can fit and use file-sharing.
When choosing good HDD's for NAS/server usage they should be CMR disks.

you can google on: CMR VS SMR NAS / Server usage
or ask Chat GPT the same question

bobkn · Sunday at 10:55 PM

Meisha said:
When you said "spinner", I thought you meant a non-RAID, non-NAS drive.

A SATA "NAS" drive is little different from a common or garden SATA drive. It's spec'd for more continuous use, and may make less vibration.

bobkn · Sunday at 10:59 PM

MisterEd said:
Have you given up on the WD My Book and WD Elements external drives? If so, then have your thought of "shucking" the drives. That means to remove the internal SATA drives from their enclosure. The only thing that may have failed was the internal SATA to USB board in the drive. The drive itself may be OK.

I have a 2TB Seagate Expansion Desktop external drive. The drive started being intermittent so I managed to copy all the data off of it before it finally failed. I shucked the drive and put it into an external enclosure. The internal drive was a 3.5-in Seagate Barracuda SATA HDD. Checking the drive showed it was encrypted so I couldn't read it. No matter because I already saved the data. I repartitioned and reformatted the drive. Testing it showed that it was good now. I copied the data back onto it.

Do both of those contain ordinary SATA drives? Some external drives use other interior interfaces, so the drives can't be extracted and plugged into standard SATA connections.

MisterEd · Monday at 12:02 AM

bobkn said:
Do both of those contain ordinary SATA drives? Some external drives use other interior interfaces, so the drives can't be extracted and plugged into standard SATA connections.

Most WD and Seagate external drives have standard SATA drives inside. There are a lot of reports about people shucking WD My Book and WD Elements drives.

bobkn · Monday at 10:39 AM

MisterEd said:
Most WD and Seagate external drives have standard SATA drives inside. There are a lot of reports about people shucking WD My Book and WD Elements drives.

Good.

bobkn · Monday at 11:28 AM

One thing I don't notice as having been mentioned: SMR (shingled magnetic recording) vs CMR (conventional magnetic recording) drives. SMR achieves a higher density than CMR, at some performance cost.

An enthusiast would avoid SMR. Whether such a drive would be adequate for editing video, I have no idea.

Marie SWE · Monday at 11:36 AM

bobkn said:
One thing I don't notice as having been mentioned: SMR (shingled magnetic recording) vs CMR (conventional magnetic recording) drives. SMR achieves a higher density than CMR, at some performance cost.

An enthusiast would avoid SMR. Whether such a drive would be adequate for editing video, I have no idea.

i did

MisterEd · Monday at 4:37 PM

bobkn said:
One thing I don't notice as having been mentioned: SMR (shingled magnetic recording) vs CMR (conventional magnetic recording) drives. SMR achieves a higher density than CMR, at some performance cost.

An enthusiast would avoid SMR. Whether such a drive would be adequate for editing video, I have no idea.

The problem is you can't tell ahead of time whether an external drive is CMR or SMR. Manufactures even change the types without telling anyone. I bought a 2nd WD My Book about 5 years after I bought the first one. The 2nd seemed to be slower but I am not sure. A little bit research showed why.

#1 Western Digital My Book 6TB (2017)
* Model No.: WDBBGB0060HBK-NA
* Internal HDD: WD60EZRZ
* Recording Technology: CMR
* Cache Size: 64MB

#2 Western Digital My Book 6TB (2022)
* Model No.: WDBBGB0060HBK-NB
* Internal HDD: WD60EDAZ
* Recording Technology: SMR
* Cache Size: 128MB

You can find the model number for the WD My Book on the case label. You can use Crystal Disk Info to find out the model number for the internal HDD.

Meisha · Monday at 5:32 PM

MisterEd said:
Have you given up on the WD My Book and WD Elements external drives? If so, then have your thought of "shucking" the drives. That means to remove the internal SATA drives from their enclosure. The only thing that may have failed was the internal SATA to USB board in the drive. The drive itself may be OK.

I have a 2TB Seagate Expansion Desktop external drive. The drive started being intermittent so I managed to copy all the data off of it before it finally failed. I shucked the drive and put it into an external enclosure. The internal drive was a 3.5-in Seagate Barracuda SATA HDD. Checking the drive showed it was encrypted so I couldn't read it. No matter because I already saved the data. I repartitioned and reformatted the drive. Testing it showed that it was good now. I copied the data back onto it.

Thanks for sharing that, MisterEd. I'm in the same situation, WD drives encrypt all your data (which I didn't know or I would never have purchased them), so I can't shuck without losing everything. At the moment one of the failing drives is intermittent and it's working today. I'm moving data to another drive, but running out of space. The other failing drive doesn't mount at all. I don't appreciate WD doing that to my data. I can't see any logic in it. How many people worry about someone opening their drive enclosure and running away with the drive? It makes no sense.

Ghot · Monday at 5:46 PM

Meisha said:
How many people worry about someone opening their drive enclosure and running away with the drive? It makes no sense.

External drives do get stolen quite often,
BUT... the encryption should be optional, and the user should be informed. ^^

Meisha · Monday at 8:22 PM

Ghot said:
External drives do get stolen quite often,
BUT... the encryption should be optional, and the user should be informed. ^^

But the data is only unreadable if the drive is removed from the enclosure, so I don't understand how encryption could protect data in that case. And yes, I agree with you very strongly, the encryption should be optional. Most people are using drives at home where there's no danger of theft. And yes, the user should be informed. I bought 8 of their external drives before I found out.

Ghot · Monday at 8:30 PM

Meisha said:
I bought 8 of their external drives before I found out.

If you haven't done so already, you might want to call WD and ask about removing the encryption.

Marie SWE · Monday at 8:34 PM

Meisha said:
But the data is only unreadable if the drive is removed from the enclosure, so I don't understand how encryption could protect data in that case. And yes, I agree with you very strongly, the encryption should be optional. Most people are using drives at home where there's no danger of theft. And yes, the user should be informed. I bought 8 of their external drives before I found out.

The reason for disks having a encrypted I/O controller card is so the data on the platters is encrypted, this is for easy destruction. Just smash the controller card and the data can't be recovered.
This is also a downside for normal people.. if the controller breaks you can't turn to a data recovery company to recover your data.
Edit:(as always have most rules an exception, this is if you can move over the chip in question to a new controller card)

Helmut · Monday at 8:56 PM

Seems to be a specialist professional requirement.
The main properties of such an HDD could be:

1. Enterprise HDD, they reckon these are more reliable than the consumer ranges and of course cost more.
2. Appropriate HDD firmware for video applications, important if streaming on/off the drive rather than just storing large video files.

All the main manufacturers make HDD ranges to cover the options.
WD, Seagate etc. Do some research bearing in mind your usage.

"I just buy drives two at a time and back up the data to both."

Mirrored drives (RAID 1) can be setup automatically with 2,4,8,...Bay NAS drives.

Obviously the NAS reliability has to be taken in to account and again is split into a consumer and professional ranges.

The SMR/CMR of HDDs is basically only a consumer range thing, but of course check to make sure.
Pre-packaged/enclosured drives could have any sort of drive inside.

MisterEd · Tuesday at 1:46 AM

Meisha said:
Thanks for sharing that, MisterEd. I'm in the same situation, WD drives encrypt all your data (which I didn't know or I would never have purchased them), so I can't shuck without losing everything. At the moment one of the failing drives is intermittent and it's working today. I'm moving data to another drive, but running out of space. The other failing drive doesn't mount at all. I don't appreciate WD doing that to my data. I can't see any logic in it. How many people worry about someone opening their drive enclosure and running away with the drive? It makes no sense.

Ideally if you suspect the drive is having problems then back up the data before the drive totally fails.
The main point in discussing the original situation is that even if the external drive fails then don't chuck it, shuck it.

The drive itself might be still OK. Put the drive in an external case and use it as an external drive again. Unfortunately, you still have to contend with the drive being encrypted. In that case all you can do is delete the partitions and partition and format it again.

If you look at how much external hard drives cost now it is too wastefully to simply throw them away if you can save them. Even a new 2TB My Book drive costs $230!

Note I originally paid $200 for the 12TB WD Elements and $250 for the 20TB WD Easystore drives. I paid $160 for the 1st and $125 for the 2nd 6TB WD My Book drives.

BTW, I have enough external hard drives to back up all my computers. Some of them every day. My main desktop computer has two external HDDs, a 12TB WD Elements and a 20TB WD Easystore. I back up the main desktop and my main laptop to the 20TB 20TB WD Easystore drive. I back up the important data every day and all the drives to it once a week. I back up the main desktop to the 12TB WD Elements drive once a month.

cheaterslick · Tuesday at 2:39 PM

MisterEd said:
#1 Western Digital My Book 6TB (2017)
#2 Western Digital My Book 6TB (2022)

Looks like the time period when these drives were made, might be a key.

Any idea when approximately the change might have been made? Something to look out for?

I have a number of WD drives that go back to 2019 and before...

MisterEd · Tuesday at 4:14 PM

cheaterslick said:
Looks like the time period when they made these drives were made, might be a key.

Any idea when approximately the change might have been made? Something to look out for?

I have a number of WD drives that go back to 2019 and before...

I don't know when the change was made. There is no way to know unless individuals with these drives compare info.

I suspect all manufactures change what particular internal drives are. They could even change it in the middle of the year. They don't tell anyone they are doing it and won't acknowledge it when asked. It has been speculated that manufactures started using SMR drives because they are cheaper to make.

Here are my external hard disk drives. I used CrystalDiskInfo to determine what the internal hard drive models were.
1. WDC 6TB My Book: Internal = WD60EZRZ-00RWYB1
2. WDC 6TB My Book: Internal = WD60EDAZ-11U78B0
3. WDC 12TB Elements: Internal = WD120EMFZ-11A6JA0
4. WDC 20TB Easystore: Internal = WD200EDGZ-11B9PA0
5. Seagate 1TB Expansion+: Internal = ST1000LM024 HN-M101MBB
6. Seagate 2TB Expansion: Internal = ST2000DM001-1CH164
7. Seagate 5TB Expansion: Internal = ST5000DM000-1FK178

Note all drives are 3.5" except #5 which is 2.5".

From research:
1. WD60EZRZ = WD Blue CMR
2. WD60EDAZ = WD Blue SMR
3. WD120EMFZ = WD White CMR
4. WD200EDGZ = WD White CMR
~~5. ST1000LM024 = Samsung Momentus SMR~~
5. ST1000LM024 = Samsung Spinpoint CMR
6. ST2000DM001 = Seagate Barracuda SMR
7. ST5000DM000 = Seagate Barracuda SMR
Many drives can be found here. Others require a Google search.
List of WD CMR and SMR hard drives (HDD)

Updated

Suggestions for a dependable storage drive

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