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?
SMR in those. Also typically 5200RPM vs 7200RPM speed.
From experience I can say you can’t reliably play back high bitrate content from those. Read and write speeds get bad after you’ve used 1/3-1/2 the drive. Oh 8MB/s should be fine. But forget playing a 4K encode at 20MB/s with a 2MB/s audio track.
As backup drives they’re acceptable as long as you can accept much longer write times to refresh data.
Bigger drives with power supplies generally are 7200RPM. Many of the lower capacity ones (under 14TB) are still SMR but you should be able to play back higher bitrate content and get a bit better read/write performance.
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.
Some WD red drives (particularly under 16TB) are SMR. There was a whole scandal with this and you can look up a list. WD Red Pro are always CMR and I think the plus typically are too but you can easily search up a list of SMR models.
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.
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.
I have bought 7 Elements and they have all lasted at least 9 years. The Mybook series have been known to fail more often and i think they use a different drive than in the elements. I only buy Elements externals and Best buys Easystore since it’s the same as elements. I have several 14-18TB drives and they work great for torrenting and data hoarding.
Hey thanks for the feedback. When you say elements, are you referring to the Desktop variant that needs external power or the portable?
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.
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 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
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.
