I am debating between those Western Digital portable drives that go up to 5tb that function with USB only (WD my passport) and the bigger ones (eg my book) that are bigger and need power outlet besides the USB connection.
Is there any difference in quality or durability to store media?
Please read up on CMR and SMR technology. All these backup HDDs in external enclosures are inferior SMR HDDs and really terrible for most uses but the occasional backup of small chunks of data. As soon as you write larger chunks of data at once to SMR drives they slow down to a crawl.
CMR drives are sold as Seagate Ironwolf, WD Red, etc.
i would avoid smaller wd external hdds, the big ones or seagate ones have sata hdd inside, but those wd ones are usb-only. you get to trash the drive if the converter fails (which is pretty common)
also consider getting larger enterprise 2nd hand drives, those are pretty cheap and nice
I would avoid an external or at least ensure the hdd inside it pinned to a normal conector.
I certainly lost data on one going bad and had no easy way of extracting data off of it due to having some soldered proprietary connection.
Not really. Any drive used for external USB is probably binned for that, meaning it may not have passed enough quality checks for higher-durability internal use.
I havent seen inside a MyPassport but the MyBook is just a standard 3.5" SATA drive with a USB controller attached. For the smaller form factor, I’d imagine they’re more integrated and not able to be shucked which means it could, in theory, be less reliable if the control board broke, but this is just speculation and the odds of that happening are probably pretty low.
That makes sense. And do you know between Mybook and Elements what is the primary difference? Besides the looks of the outer casing.
There may have been a difference at one point before WD realized what people were commonly using these for, but I was previously using 5 shucked Elements and one MyBook (all 8TB) bought between 2018 and 2024 and they were all the same white label drives.
Piggybacking to ask if anyone knows of any external HDD that is SATA internally so I can take it apart and shove it into my system. The price difference is insane right now
This is called drive schucking, if you search for that you should be able to find some lists
Thank you!
Thank you! I didn’t know that was a thing, but since I’m in the market to begin building a NAS, that will surely be useful to know terminology
If it’s for a NAS try to make sure it’s CMR (conventional) and not a shingled drive (SMR). Shingled will be slower and noisier and SMART tests will take days to run as it gets near full.
ETA: Western Digital - Seagate
And thank you for that, too. I had no idea there would be so much to consider, but I’m glad to be informed.
No problem. I unfortunately found out about shingled drives after I bought them. Now I have a noisy 8TB drive that takes 18hrs to run a long SMART self test plus 2 4TB ones. The transfer speeds are lower too but otherwise they work fine and fortunately I’m just using them for media.
AFAIK there’s no advantage to shingled drives at all. They make them because they’re cheaper than CMR. It was a few years of the manufacturers selling them before they actually admitted it IIRC.
Any drive you see labeled as NAS or Enterprise will definitely be CMR. It’s the regular/gaming/external ones you need to watch out for.
Good question. I would imagine the internal ones would be cheaper, but its the contrary. Crazy
I don’t think the durability of data is affected in your examples. All of my external USB disks are kinda old but they run on type-B; the ones with additional power will probably have a faster spin. If running on USB type-C then that may not be an issue either.
