Which is better / more reliable for holding data?
Thanks, that's good to know! (I had a Seagate drive that died on me just a year after purchase, taking most of my data with it.)
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Same here. I have changed two Seagate in two years, so yeah. It is time to move on.
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I have a Seagate from 2005 that's still working (its twin brother only died because it fell on the floor during an emergency).
I also have a bunch of WDs of various ages, all considered old by SMART, that are still working flawlessly, and I know people who were not as lucky as me.
Point is, reliability is comparable across major brands, some do slightly better, some slightly worse, the rest is just anecdotes, or individual data points with little or no meaning.
IIRC recently Hitachi has the highest reliability, there's specialist sites that publish objective data.
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2.5" external drives are never going to perform as well as a 3.5" internal drive.
I've never used an Easystore drive, but many of my customers have been using Elements drives for years and they've been mostly reliable.
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Well, at least it sounds like none of your customers absolutely hated Elements drives! (That's a really big plus! :)
Nowadays, external drives are going SSD too -- I feel, depending on the data transfer rate between the drive and computer, they might even get as fast as an internal spinny drive one day. :O
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I've always had baracudas and elements and they always worked fine and/or die within reasonable years.
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Elements Drives are what I use. If you want to know which is best, look at the size as to if it’s a 3.5 or a 2.5 drive and it’s RPM speeds assuming they’re are mechanical drives. If it’s RPM’s are higher then go with that one but I would assume the drives inside are just normal internal hard drives that WD sells.
I bought 2 8TB WD My Book’s just so I could crack them open and take the drives out and use them in my NAS as internal drives. Why I did this ? Because the 8TB drives inside them are WD Red’s and they are $100 cheaper inside the enclosure then they are to buy as 3.5 standalone internals because they don’t sell as well.
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I think WD got wise on it, and started putting in White label drives instead. At least on Reddit forum, people said older drives were Red inside but all the newer ones seem to be White label. (Personally, my EasyStore also turned out to be a WD White, even though it was made in Thailand and had all the right numbers on the box. Of course, I'm using this just as standalone drive, and am fine with a White label drive.) Wish I had heard about shucking drives much earlier -- would have bought a couple of those 8TB ones few years ago.
P.s. Just in case others on SG are looking for Reds: there's apparently still a few of the older external drives left on store shelves in US, that have been sitting in a store's inventory for a while, and some people still get lucky every now and then finding a WD Red inside. :) (Small guide here)
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I seen them 8TB white drives, they’re really just the reds as well in full spec, but they messed with the power on them so you can’t use a SATA power connection from your PSU. The work around to this is to by pass one of the pins with some tape or use a Molex to SATA power cable as it doesn’t use that pin. But this doesn’t mean all white labels will be reds reworked around. It seems to be the larger drives over 6 TB. I seen some people buy 4 TB and get white labels that are really green drives or blues.
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Honestly, I am not a fan of WD drives. I already had two and both of them gave up after 2-3 years.
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Bad run? Generally WD are better than Seagate, but there are different grades (Black, Green, Blue, Red) so I guess there are differences in build quality between the low-end and the high-end.
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I got 7 WD drives, 4 of which I bought back in 2006; all but one still running 100% healthy as everyday use. The one that died was an old 320 GB Raptor and it kicked the bucket in 2017. I stay away from seagate because I had 3 in the pass die on me after 3 or so years. And Toshiba in my opinion is garbage, never had one yet make it to the 2 year mark. I stick with the drives that last over decades. WD are my drives of choice.
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Holy cow, it lasted 11 years‽ I'm honestly very impressed!
To be honest, none of my WD drives have failed me yet, and I'm looking forward to a full decade of service now. I had a Seagate Barracuda drive a while back that failed just after warranty expired. Another Seagate failed after only a year of everyday, normal computer use. Since then, I've been picking up WD drives that are a bit more expensive, but absolutely none of them have ever failed on me. Sometimes, I'm tempted when there's a crazy sale for Seagate drives that makes it super cheap -- then I think of all the pain I felt when those two Seagate drives died on me, back when I was too poor to have a backup drive.
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Im in a similar boat. I have 10 WD Elements drives in total (all external drives), ranging from 1TB to 4TB. Just tried to search for Invoices, so the oldest one which I could find was dated back to 2010. This Invoice was for 2TB drive, so, considering that I have 1x 1TB and 1x 1.5TB drives as well (these were purchased directly in the retail shops, without digital Invoices), I suspect that I started purchasing WD drives back in ~2007 (plus/minus one year).
Till now, all 10 drives are still functioning perfectly. Some drives are running 24/7, some are used as offline storage only.
Guess I was lucky, zero defected rate. I can only quote elochai934: "WD are my drives of choice." (at least older ones, as I did not purchase a new one since 2016).
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I owned many WD drives over the years, they all eventually died. Using a samsung HDD now, been working fine for about 5 years and two cross-country moves. One very important thing to note if you want a mechanical hard drive to last: ALWAYS make sure to disable any power saving features on windows (such as "turn off hard disc after ___ minutes" in Windows 7), as the more often a HDD platters start/stop spinning (especially if done in short intervals) the faster it will die.
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... as the more often a HDD platters start/stop spinning (especially if done in short intervals) the faster it will die.
This is news to me. Thank you for sharing that bit of information.
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Likewise, thanks for the tip! (Now if only we could prevent external HD's from spinning down all the time -- the lag when it has to spin up from sleep can be really frustrating!)
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What you could also look up is some of those Refurbished Sales that WD and other Brands do throw now and then. If you are not using them in a Working Environment I can tell you out of my own experience that those Disk work without any flaws and do what they are supposed to do while on top often being sold at an even cheaper price range those usual sales flow around.
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I love the WD Passport myself, but it is not conducive to swapping the connectors if it fails
A full size external HDD has a standard SATA connection inside the device, IIRC.
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Good point! Though, owning a WD My Passport Ultra drive myself, I can say that it's pretty sturdy -- I've dropped it a couple of times from several feet up (those "heart in my mouth" moments, thinking all my data had just gotten corrupted), bumped it countless other times while plugged in, and it's always been just fine afterwards like nothing happened <knock on wood>. I'd love to get another, however given that they're extremely expensive compared to the Elements / Easystores (which seem to both need separate AC adapters, whereas the Passport is conveniently USB-powered & much lighter / smaller), I have to go with the Elements drives. When I'm much richer, I'd love to just get Passports instead! :)
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They are convenient, and compact, which does make them pricier. I would not have gotten mine if it hadn't been on a tremendous sale and I had a gift card to that store. By the way, bhphotovideo.com often has good prices for WD drives, as they are an official seller of them. Have you checked there? They sometimes run "check your email for the price" sales, where the emailed price is cheaper than they are allowed to advertise the product.
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We have also had good success with the WD My Book external drives. They do, however, require extra power.
(Also, I heard something about the bigger Passports almost require USB 3 ports in order to run at USB 3 speeds, as a standard USB 2 port will not supply enough power for the drive to run at full speed.)
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I thought WD EasyStore was a Best Buy exclusive line, otherwise the drives inside are probably the same. Especially with the large drives they usually only have one or two models that they make in the first place. Obviously they could be binned disks or something with lower quality score but there's really no way to know that.
Sometimes the enclosure quality differs, fan vs. no-fan, power supply, or bundled software for encryption vs non-encrypted etc.
I had a 8TB WD Elements that died after about 2 years, won't spin up, just makes clicking noises. If I keep turning it off and on again it will eventually spin up about 5% of the time, so at least I was able to copy all of my data off of it.
Got a 10TB easystore that has been running for a few months so far with no hiccups... speed over USB3 (assuming a sufficiently fast host controller with UAS) is nearly the same as a local SATA disk. I install and run most Steam games from the external drive.
Because my data is important to me, I actually bought 2 of the easystores and use one as a clone of the other. Basically I keep one running 24/7 and the other I turn on once a week and rsync the contents of the "hot" drive to the "cold" drive.
I used to have a nice external SAS RAID6 setup but lost it in a flood and have not had the money or time to rebuild something like that again.
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Got a 10TB easystore that has been running for a few months so far with no hiccups.....
Crimony ... You people and your large-capacity drives. It has taken me five years to push the storage limit of my 2TB drive and you folks are talking about 8 and 10TB. P
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Sorry to hear about the flood!
Thanks for the tip on the On-Off trick to rescue data! (Though I hope my external drives will give me fair warning before they die -- enough time to transfer data and abandon drive. :)
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I'm not sure if the drive itself is bad, or if the power supply/enclosure is bad. But I haven't had time to rip the disk out and try it in a different enclosure yet.
I had an old WD Red internal drive which behaved the same way when it was brand new, so... i dunno...
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If you are adamant on on those two, then Elements.
Although I would rather go for a My Passport in the WD lineup. Or even better: a Seagate Backup (yes, I know that Seagate has a bad reputation on 3.5" HDDs, but their portable ones have always been pretty damn great, my old Samsung-branded Seagate HDD is still kicking at full USB2 speeds after 9 years).
Although if all you want is external and not portable storage, then just buy a casing and put a standard 3.5" drive in there. Make sure the thing is USB 3.1 or USB-C, and you have pretty much no transfer speed loss.
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The external WD Elements was my first, smallest (500GB) and most beautiful HDD.
I still have it, so yes, I think they're durable. Too bad the later models weren't that stylish :)
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Hopefully SG'ers have found this thread useful! Thanks, everyone, for sharing your experiences!
Poll-wise, it looks like Elements easily won over EasyStores -- with potato-battery-powered hard drives being the most reliable drives (obviously ;). However, given I'd have to water those potatoes every now and then to keep the juice flowing, I think I'll have to go with Elements. ;)
Since it's backordered for 2-4 weeks at the sale price, I'll have to wait till then. I'm really looking forward to it! :D
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Hi, I have run out of room on my internal hard drive, and would like to get an external hard drive to be hooked up all the time (I looked inside my computer case and there's power wires in the way of the other bays that would be impossible to move aside). There's a sale for a WD Elements external drive for the next couple hours. However, I am confused about whether Elements is worse or better than the EasyStore drive (which is what I have right now for data backups). I'd much rather have the backup drive go bust than the main storage drive. That being said, I'm trying to figure out which would be the better drive to use as a main. Would appreciate people's inputs or sharing any experience with these Elements / EasyStore drives. (Also, I'll be using the drives in their original enclosures rather than in a NAS.)
Have a gib (L1+) as thanks for reading this!
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