Why are external HDDs so much cheaper than bare drives...

I have 12 4TB external HDD's and I will get more. I know they are shit, but I don't really have any other option for quick swapping and having something that can be moved around.

>manufacturers just dropping their defective drives into USB cases to get rid of them and make some extra cash
I doubt it, my barracuda LP 1TB 5900 RPM drive taken from an external lasted me from october 09 to january 2019, and I used it in the build because it was cheap.

They still are for 3.5" drives, the 2.5" drives are mostly USB soldered now except the Seagate non slim externals.

Plenty of WD 8~10 TBs have Red Caviar NAS drives in them. Which are substantially better than the shit EZRZ and EZRX shit.

WD basically got rid of the true Caviar Blues and now just put Blue labels on Green drives and you can't turn off aggressive head parking anymore,

1 dead WD 2TB EZRX
1 dead WD 3TB EZRX
1 WD 2TB EZRX with a "Caution" status
1 dead WD 2TB EZRZ
1 WD 4TB EZRZ with a "Caution" status
1 WD 1TB EADS that needs further testing
1 WD 1TB FALS that needs further testing as the other drive of the pair died.

Last batch of Seagates I've had badly fail was half a dozen 7200.11/12s currently testing a single 8TB drive.

Had 3 Toshiba drives, 1TB, 2TB, 3TB
Only the 3TB remains.
I'm down to my last 500gb and 1TB Hitachis.

I used to swear by WDs, but they are failing as bad as the 7200.11/12 Seagates recently holy fuck.

That's 2.5" drives anymore. They don't even make large (>2TB) internal 2.5" drives anymore, they're that unpopular. The only things that even still use 2.5" drives are budget and gaming laptops and usually only 1 or 2TB.

Their 3.5" drives are just from their NAS or enterprise platforms with a differently configured firmware and labeling

The reason they don't make 2.5" drives larger than 2TB is because they have to be more than 9mm and no laptop makers want a 12mm 2.5" drive these days, they want mostly 7~9mm that and SSDs have basically hit parity with 2.5" drives that it's just not worth investing into anymore.

4TB 2.5" drives are thick AF.

Really depends on the model. There were a few WD enclosures that I know people in /hsg/ were buying like crazy because it was like $120 for an 8TB. The drive inside was a WD red NAS drive once you shucked the shell.

People use those 2.5" HDDs for internal storage on PS4s as well and the slot on that will only fit 9mm drives without bending the shit out of it.

I'm pissed because the main drives in my desktop are 3TB and I want an external of that size so that I know whatever goes on there will fit in the external. then I can survive a lightning strike that kills everything plugged into the wall, or if my house burns down I can just grab my bag and run and know I have a copy of everything on that drive.

External 2.5 drives come in 4tb faggot

External drives are a consumer product, internals(particularly 3.5"" and mechanical drives in general) are a niche thing at this point. They know they can charge more to people who want bare drives so they do.

I kinda figured people would just put SSDs in the PS4 and hook up a cheap $120 external 8TB WD from bestbuy or walmart.

Just use a 8~10TB 3.5" external or offsite backup.

Buy a 4TB internal drive for $100 or so, and a good USB 3.0 3.5" enclosure. Voila, you made your own external. Also you should have everything plugged into a surge protector. If you REALLY cared about your tech, get an UPS.

Originally the PS4 did not support USB hard drives, but in the past year or 2 they pushed new firmware to let people use them, for the first 4 or so years it was just whatever you could fit inside.

I specifically want a laptop drive since it's smaller and less fragile. I know an SSD would be less fragile still, but I'm not gonna pay $100/TB

>2.5" drive is less fragile
Huh? You realize higher capacity 2.5" drives require more platters to achieve their storage density right? More platters means more fragility? 4TB 3.5" is the most reliable drive and most cost efficient drive on the market right now regardless if manufacturer.

> usb hdds are just internal drives in an enclosure with a usb-sata interface

not anymore

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>you can't turn off aggressive head parking anymore,

Any Idea on how I can make this?
Like a month ago I bought x2 2.5 500GB WD Blacks ant the things just shutdown at certain time.

I have them on consoles and I can hear how they "turn on" randomly

Replace them with SSDs they are going to be fucked.

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I'm not talking about reliability where it sits on a desk, I'm taking about reliability where you unplug it and stick it in your backpack. Laptop drives pay attention to shock resistance, 3.5" drives assume they'll be stationary and don't like being moved.

>make 14 TB 10000 hard drives in factory
>some hard drive got bad sectors on platter
>Set firmware to label these hard drives as lower capacity than 14 TB (12, 10, 8 TB etc.) instead of throwing hard drive away
>quality check hard drive
>hard drive not pass specs for enterprise working conditions
>set these are external hard drives

i have a 11 year old wd green i ripped out of an enclosure that still works

take off the converter

i browsed the entire thread and didnt find a single reply that pointed out that externals come with OEM software suites and pitches to buy subscription services. thats probably the most obvious reason why they have a price reduction compared to internals.

also, the consumer market is generally cost driven. internal drives arent typically purchased by consumers, rather, entusiasts, and can have a higher margin.

but that's wrong you dumb fuck
They test the platters before they ever go into harddrives you little dipshit.

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I don't understand your issue here I don't. 6ou make it sound like you're going to be moving the drive daily, multiple times a day even. This is just a SHTF drive right? House burning down so you snatch it and run? Also if data integrity of being bounced around constantly was a huge issue to you, you would just get something flash based. There's no way you have 3TB+ of highly sensitive data right? Because if you did and it was mega important, you'd have it off site. Or on tape.

Exactly. But the tards over on Reddit think they’re exactly as good as retail NAS drives. Yeah that’s it, WD just decided they wanted to sell some for half off for no reason.

it's both that, and to have all my shit with me on my laptop when I'm out and about. Not solely one or the other, dual-purpose.

any chance its possible to put on a new controller?

Wtf? I haven't seen one irl yet. How common are these?

Well, I just get rid of that shit with a little utility from WD.

well shit

i have a 2.5 wd 4tb external

Reds are good. I beat 'em and I've never had one fail yet. Blue desktop drives, now those are shit.

Just recently ended up with some Ironwolves. It will be interesting to see how they hold up. I've not had good luck with Seagate even in the Enterprise line.

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They're about the same in my country, even the external are more expensive than internal.

I buy entire stock of seagates now.

Not when an external drive will be subject to more drops and shocks.

>shucking

been going on 2-3 years now. i tried to get some of these for my friend's PS3 and he didn't want to wait the extra 2-3 days; we bought one at Target and it had this slot inside.
>he didn't believe me when i said they changed the controllers

Quick question lads. My HDD is going RIP but my main SSD is fine.

I was wondering if I could keep using games on my SSD and if they would go unaffected as a result of my HDD dying? Just wanna keep playing my games until I get a replacement (in the next week or so), my dying drive has nothing of worth on it anyway except for movies that seem to work fine anyway

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if the drive dies just restore the stuff on it from your backups

Yea I got that, but will the games i'm using on my C drive (SSD) be affected when the HDD inevitably conks out?

Also, are there any recommended fix attempts to see if I can salvage this HDD?

wowza, I thought I was bad with 4 2TBs and a 4TB. I was laptop only for a decade, yeah...

What's wrong with shucking faggot?

New ones are unsupported.

The only way it would be affected is if you were full blown stupid when installing the O/S and had the system/boot partition linked to a partition on the HDD, which only occasionally happens if you had the SSD as drive 1 and HDD as drive 0 and had the HDD higher on the boot list than the SSD.

It's slow.

What's the best way to wipe a WD before selling it?

Indeed they did
So now I just have them all hanging off USB ports. Given that they come nowhere near able to saturate any kind of decent USB shit you just hang them all off a hub and have a long powder board for their power cables.

any drive wiping software will be fine, even stuff like ccleaner's wipe or even the built in win 10 one would be fine.

If you have more than a few TB of storage, you literally have a mental illness.

see
It doesn't matter how much the drives cost to produce, price is driven by demand and volume. For every internal 8TB drive Western Digital sells, they're probably selling 50 external 8TB drives. Dramatically increased volume > dramatically reduced cost. That's not always the case for every product, but it is here.

>Dramatically increased volume leads to dramatically reduced cost
just to clarify

Mine worked.
Pic related. Date code are from Jan/Feb 2018.

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user you seem quite experienced in this so I'll ask you. I've been planning to get a NAS and fill it up with two 2-3 TB drives in mirrored just to be sure i won't loose the data; what are the most reliable ones?

Cheapest way is to shuck WD NAS drives.
Most expensive way is to order a brown box full of Iron wolves or Red Caviars.

Either way, Raid is not a backup solution, you gotta have at least GFS backup, preferably with also offsite backup, if you can't really afford offsite backup, go with GFS and something like backblaze.

3TB drives are awful. 2TB drives aren't that great as far as bang for buck goes.
4TB is the sweet spot if you aren't shucking drives, other wise 8TB for 120ish bucks or less is the best way to go.
As I mentioned in my original post EZRZ and EZRX are shit drives, avoid at all costs.

Also 2bay is hardly a "NAS" If you're going to be putting blurays or other shit on their even 4 bays might not be enough in the long run. With 8 bays, you're going to loose 2 bays for drive redundancy/raid unless you're going yolo and JBOD.

What ever floats your boat man, my 24TBs is just a drop in the bucket compared to what other people are running.

> internal drives arent typically purchased by consumers, rather, entusiasts,

> Putting in a new internal HD in your box now makes you a hax0r

Really, you kids nowadays.

I work at a smaller computer repair shop and we get people waiting to pay us to back up their photos to a flash drive. From a fully working laptop. Had one today. We take their money, too

They're drives that failed some of the tests or refurbs.

> If you have more than a few dozen books, you literally have a mental illness.

See the similarity?

What kind of conditions are you running your hard drives? Though, looks like you're only having trouble with blues.
Are they in swap bays or have active air cooling?
Is the power supply connected to a voltage regulator or battery backup?

How do you browse a site like 4channel, with almost completely temporary content and not think "I need to save what I find"
Especially when companies are happy to block, remove, and take down content. It's important to archive what you're interested in.

1. voids warranty

2. potential damage

3. makes you a giant "what type of drive inside? Red?" faggot on the internet

I have them in both internally and in external 8bay enclosures with dedicated 1U power supplies and active cooling. The Blue and Greens are just shit and rack up a lot of power cycle counts due to all the head parking and going into low power state even though I have their power profiles set to never idle. The Blacks don't have the head parking problem but they are pretty bad cost to performance wise. I can buy 8TB Seagates for every 4TB Black and have backups. They are on AVRs.

My WD EURS series surveillance drive registers a 62 power cycle and a 35772 power on hours connected to the same power source as my Seagate 8TB M004 which registers 3 power cycles over 6767 hours.

Fucking WD EZRZ has 2098 power cycles over 8241 hours connected to the same power as the above 2 drives and is now in C5 caution state.
WD EZRX has 5075 power cycles over 25199 hours in C5/C6.

I don't have a single EZRZ or EZRX drive left that isn't dead or in the middle of dying. The EURS being one of the older series actually is doing great, but the newer consumer drives are just garbage. EZRZ and EZRX are the exact same drive internally. When WD got rid of the Green line, they actually got rid of the Blue line and put Blue stickers on Green drives.

I have no experience with the new EZAZ 256M/5400RPM blue line so I can't speak for them, though I'd probably never get one for personal use as 2TB drives are just too small and the 6TB one costs almost as much as 8TB drives. Maybe I'll deploy them for some clients if they specifically request for them. I still have clients that specifically request for WD drives instead of Seagate or Toshiba.

wdidle3 or the unix equivalent doesn't work anymore? I heard the disable option doesn't do anything, so you have to max out the delay, but that was a few years ago.

I was sizing up costs for a personal NAS/dns/tunnel server when 4TB reds were on sale, but missed the sale while waffling on other parts. Wouldn't have been enough if I wanted to consolidate my backups and media and have room to expand. Almost went with Toshiba, since I have a few of their externals that never gave me problems, but 7200rpm seems like a waste in a RAID.
Curious to see if Seagate has surpassed WD in reliability. There's a lingering notion that WD only has the different flavors of drives because they know their headparking nonsense reduces life.

Yup.
dem seagates
while true;do touch /mnt/4tb/spin;sync -f /mnt/4tb/spin&&sleep 5;done

wdidle3 or idle3ctl doesn't work with EZRZ drives, and the feed back with EZRX drives have been a mixed bag.
You don't want head parking in raid because it'll drop out and fuck things up

I have 2 MD04 Toshiba 4TBs at the moment, 1 has the 05 reallocated sectors count error @ 33527hrs 121 cycles, the other is running fine @ 27719 hrs and 1361 cycles.
I have 1 DT01 3TB Toshiba with no problems @ 35062 hrs and 1094 cycles.

At this point I'm just fed up with WD consumer drives and will not touch anything other than Reds in the foreseeable future until WD stops with the shit head parking nonsense that shreds drives.

Seagate has 8TB M004 drives for $15 ($200) more than it would cost me to shuck a WD 8TB Mybook $185 and their 8TB EFAX reds are $240 a piece here. Drives are expensive where I live and I don't have access to $120 USD 8TB specials here. I'm might be getting a second M004 to replace my fleet EZRZ/EZRX fleet. Toshiba MD06s are at $240 a piece here.

Fucking HDD Triopoly sucks and cheap 8TB SSDs are no where on the horizon. Cheapest 2TB SSD is where I'm located is the ADATA SU800 2TB at $215.

Someone should make a WD vs Seagate vs HGST holy war thread

8tb and up are really expensive honestly and a huge reliability risk if you can't improve reliability with duplicates or keep backups. Doesn't feel like there has been much progress in capacity either.

Not sure if SSDs are worth trusting for a raid environment. The speeds would certainly be silly.

HGST is owned by WD now. The factories may or may not still be separate.
Toshiba would be the third party, but they only recently started venturing into the 3.5" consumer market.

HGST is WD,

In October 2015, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce issued a decision allowing Western Digital to begin integrating HGST into its main business. WD was required to maintain the HGST brand and sale team for at least two more years.[9] In 2018, Western Digital announced that it was phasing out its HGST brand and that all of its remaining product lines (particularly Ultrastar) will henceforth be marketed under the Western Digital brand.

True successor to the HGST brand is Toshiba

"As part of the deal, Western Digital agreed to trade assets with Toshiba, with Toshiba receiving assets for the production of 3.5-inch hard drives, in exchange for a Toshiba factory in Thailand for producing 2.5-inch drives (which had been inactive since the 2011 floods)."

Oh there is progress, mainly enterprise helium drives. Currently the King of the Hill is 15TB Ultrastar Helium.
3 Days ago Seagate uped the ante with 16TB IronWolf and Exos drives though.

I swear that fucking flood is why drives have been garbage this decade. And that exchange serves as a warning to not get any 2.5" WD drives in the near future.
Also, wasn't HGST Hitachi? Why are the Chinks managing such a deal, unless their foundries were always in chinkland?

Hopefully prices also shift down somewhat. Or maybe start doing something about reliability, but why do that when it's making everyone buy more drives?

HGST was Hitachi, bought out by WD, china cited antitrust and wanted WD to trade 3.5" Hitachi factories with Toshiba's 2.5" factories giving WD more 2.5" capabilities and boosting Toshiba into the 3.5" market.

Many of Toshibas were just Hitachis with rebranded firmware.

Hitachi drives will just say Hitachi.
WD owned Hitachi drives will say HGST, but those are being phased out.

Are externals really cheaper?
External SSDs certainly aren't but flash is also a different tech.

This seems plausible.
Externals using lower quality parts and shorter warranty are also plausible reasons.

>Are externals really cheaper?

There are a lot of external deals every week. Check slickdeals. 8tb WD for around $130 are routine, often drop down around $100 on special deals. Seagates, significantly less.

Recent internal 8tb deals are $180ish for Seagates, $210+ for WD Red.

Can I use one of these on Xbox One? I don't want one powered by USB only

do you "hawk a loogie" as well?

>
>If you have more than a few TB of storage, you literally have a mental illness.

What kind of retarded statement is that?

kek

I've ran EZRZ raid-z1 with backup and been waiting these to die for almost a year now.

10k hours and 50k load cycle count, so head should last "up to" 40k hours. Some people at freenas forums have ran over 400 000 LCC with these.

Bare in mind I bought these as external recertified drives 60€ a piece in 2017 for a temporary storage solution with at that time pretty fast read/write for the cost.

amazon.de 150€ / 8TB external is best eu has right now and I'm using 2 of those as backup.

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You don't hawk a loogie, you hock it. And what does that have to do with shucking drives?

10tb is on sale for $160 at Best buy right now.

I got an external 3tb which had a barracuda or iron wolf in I'm not sure and cba to take open my server to check, I have been using it to seed torrents from so it's pretty much been in use constantly for above 16 months now and I haven't noticed any issues with it yet

Lots of WD externals, notably certain models are quality NAS drives, either actual WD Reds or as lately white label drives identical to Reds or in some cases WD Gold or Hgst Nas Helium drives . Some had the 3.3v new standard which meant they wouldn't work with older f
Desktop PSUs w/ SATA power without a tape mod or of course you could just use molex.

If you buy one to shuck, be aware of the box model, area of manufacture (ie for awhile China drives had 128mn cache, while Thailand ones were 256mb) and importantly the drive model itself. Hook it up to Crystal Disk Info before you shuck it to get info and run tests for bad sectors or other issues. If it isn't what you want send it back. Oh and you can check if you got a Helium drive too - I think it's category 22

Get enterprise hard drives, they are made to run all day. They are reasonably priced per gigabyte. I like 24 TB Exos.

Ok? But Western Digital has longer warranties on their internal drive vs. the external ones.

>Pending sector count >0
>Reallocated =0
>Uncorrectable = 0

It's probably fine, just keep an eye on the pending count. If it grows you may have issues.