$179.99 WD Easystore 10TB External USB 3.0 Hard Drive - Black [Best Buy]

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Anandtech1999

Member
Mar 30, 2020
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Cheapest per TB external HDD I've seen right now.
Under $18 per TB!!!
Own brand for BestB
Choose your free gift: $25 to spend or 8x8 Photo Book
Comes with free delivery

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MisterE

MisterE

Golden Member
Mar 7, 2000
1,091
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Nice, I've been wanting to dump several smaller drives to a large drive so that I can rearrange my data. Almost $17 sales tax is a little sucky, but still a great deal.
 
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SamirD

Golden Member
Jun 12, 2019
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MisterE said:
$17 sales tax is a little sucky...
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Anyone not charging sales tax anymore will get in trouble, so taxes won't make a difference when comparing apples to apples.

Everything should have been taxed from day one so the online companies didn't kill the CompUSAs and Circuit Cities of the retailing world and we'd have more choices to get these locally.
 
Fanatical Meat

Fanatical Meat

Lifer
Feb 4, 2009
34,576
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Anandtech1999 said:
And Seagate is even cheaper
131.99 for 8TB so sub $16.5
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Cool find, I do have to rant about a pet peeve of mine. Amazon review:
*Titled* Not Suitable for Small Business
I run a small business with a group of friends. We ordered 18 of these WD 10TB Elements External drives so we can each have additional storage to our work computers. The reason for these specific drives is because they were reviewed as easy to set up and use and have high reliability.

Duh it is a consumer drive, NOT a business drive. People irritate me with stuff like this, I want the exceptional reliability of a business class storage solution but I don't want to pay the price premium so I'll go cheap and complain that what I got isn't business class....
 
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VirtualLarry

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
56,343
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Seagate drive is most likely "Shingled" - aka "Archive Drive". Then again, I've read the the WD Red drives are also "Shingled". So, guess it's a toss-up. I'd personally rather have a WD drive than a Seagate, but my 5TB Seagate desktop drives in my NAS are still working, when reviews said that they were the worst drives available for NAS. Maybe I'm just lucky?
 
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Anandtech1999

Member
Mar 30, 2020
38
7
41
VirtualLarry said:
Seagate drive is most likely "Shingled" - aka "Archive Drive". Then again, I've read the the WD Red drives are also "Shingled". So, guess it's a toss-up. I'd personally rather have a WD drive than a Seagate, but my 5TB Seagate desktop drives in my NAS are still working, when reviews said that they were the worst drives available for NAS. Maybe I'm just lucky?
Click to expand...

Funny you mention SMR.... https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/news/wd-fesses-up-some-red-hdds-use-slow-smr-tech
 
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SamirD

Golden Member
Jun 12, 2019
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Fanatical Meat said:
Cool find, I do have to rant about a pet peeve of mine. Amazon review:
*Titled* Not Suitable for Small Business
I run a small business with a group of friends. We ordered 18 of these WD 10TB Elements External drives so we can each have additional storage to our work computers. The reason for these specific drives is because they were reviewed as easy to set up and use and have high reliability.

Duh it is a consumer drive, NOT a business drive. People irritate me with stuff like this, I want the exceptional reliability of a business class storage solution but I don't want to pay the price premium so I'll go cheap and complain that what I got isn't business class....
Click to expand...
Yeah, drives me nuts too. People shuck these and put them in nas units and then the volume fails--not the drive's fault as it was designed to be an external consumer drive.

Or complain about smr in cheaper drives. Cheaper drive will have cheaper tech. If you want to good stuff you have to pony up.

If you want real reliability, sas is where it is at. None of the shenanigans like in the sata world.
 
VirtualLarry

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
56,343
10,046
126
I will say this though, although the mfgs of consumer NAS devices (QNAP, Synology, Lenovo/EMC, etc), often "recommend" "NAS-rated" drives, most owners/users of them, simply throw in the cheapest highest-capacity drives that they can afford. At least, I do. Which in my case, were 4x 5TB Seagate "Desktop" drives, shucked, and 4x WD Red 8TB, and 4x WD Red 10TB, again, all shucked from externals. They may not carry a warranty like the internal drives, but I doubt that they're much different in terms of quality, and for the price, you can just buy an extra to have a spare on hand, should one die. The NAS will run them in RAID-5 or RAID-10, so you don't have to worry so much about any one drive failing, due to redundancy. (Still should buy a high-capacity external drive, and make Cold Backups of your important NAS data. As we know, "RAID is NOT Backup".)
 
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mikeford

Diamond Member
Jan 27, 2001
5,666
157
106
My idea for a external drive like these is to RARELY power it up or connect it, just maybe once a month or so as a back up to all the files it would be painful to recover.

OTOH once burned twice shy, one of the buggy circuit board Seagates failed on me, then later a motherboard failed with a raid array running off it, and both times Seagate stepped up to help, but it was months to 90% recover. Now I stick to WD reds, despite knowing enough time has past for everything to have changed.
 
Fanatical Meat

Fanatical Meat

Lifer
Feb 4, 2009
34,576
15,790
136
mikeford said:
My idea for a external drive like these is to RARELY power it up or connect it, just maybe once a month or so as a back up to all the files it would be painful to recover.

OTOH once burned twice shy, one of the buggy circuit board Seagates failed on me, then later a motherboard failed with a raid array running off it, and both times Seagate stepped up to help, but it was months to 90% recover. Now I stick to WD reds, despite knowing enough time has past for everything to have changed.
Click to expand...

If these are in a RAID setup other than zero isn’t that pretty safe for a consumer?
These are overkill for my backup needs, what I really want is one of the “My Cloud” devices that can backup phones.
 
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SamirD

Golden Member
Jun 12, 2019
1,489
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www.huntsvillecarscene.com
VirtualLarry said:
I will say this though, although the mfgs of consumer NAS devices (QNAP, Synology, Lenovo/EMC, etc), often "recommend" "NAS-rated" drives, most owners/users of them, simply throw in the cheapest highest-capacity drives that they can afford. At least, I do. Which in my case, were 4x 5TB Seagate "Desktop" drives, shucked, and 4x WD Red 8TB, and 4x WD Red 10TB, again, all shucked from externals. They may not carry a warranty like the internal drives, but I doubt that they're much different in terms of quality, and for the price, you can just buy an extra to have a spare on hand, should one die. The NAS will run them in RAID-5 or RAID-10, so you don't have to worry so much about any one drive failing, due to redundancy. (Still should buy a high-capacity external drive, and make Cold Backups of your important NAS data. As we know, "RAID is NOT Backup".)
Click to expand...
And because the cost is cheap enough to have spare drives, that's why people do it. But if you can't afford the downtime or the data is of a critical nature (where the replacement cost is several times the cost of the drives themselves), that's where true enterprise drives come into play.

Aside from the firmware differences between 'nas' drives and the high-end desktop ones, I don't think the nas drives are built anything like the enterprise ones since the things that make the enterprise ones more durable seem to be at odds with consumer drives (like being 'quiet'). The enterprise drives I have seem to have a lot more robust purpose during their operation (aka noisier, but in a solid way) than their consumer cousins.

I've learned that the real reliability is in sas drives. These are truly non-nonsense when it comes to reliability and performance. And with how cheap sas controllers can be these days, it almost is a no brainer to get one of these and pair them with some lightly used enterprise drives that have a tremendous amount of life left in them.
 
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SamirD

Golden Member
Jun 12, 2019
1,489
276
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www.huntsvillecarscene.com
mikeford said:
My idea for a external drive like these is to RARELY power it up or connect it, just maybe once a month or so as a back up to all the files it would be painful to recover.

OTOH once burned twice shy, one of the buggy circuit board Seagates failed on me, then later a motherboard failed with a raid array running off it, and both times Seagate stepped up to help, but it was months to 90% recover. Now I stick to WD reds, despite knowing enough time has past for everything to have changed.
Click to expand...
I had an old 80GB drive I used like that. It probably didn't even have more than a couple of thousand hours on it. But after being not used for a few years, I was lucky enough to get all the data off of it before it stopped reading. I've learned that drives that sit seem to have as many problems as drives that are close to the end of their design life.
 
MisterE

MisterE

Golden Member
Mar 7, 2000
1,091
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91
SamirD said:
I had an old 80GB drive I used like that. It probably didn't even have more than a couple of thousand hours on it. But after being not used for a few years, I was lucky enough to get all the data off of it before it stopped reading. I've learned that drives that sit seem to have as many problems as drives that are close to the end of their design life.
Click to expand...

My Western Digital Black 640GB has been spinning 24/7 since I bought it in December 2008, it's the boot drive in my main PC.
 
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mikeford

Diamond Member
Jan 27, 2001
5,666
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Fanatical Meat said:
If these are in a RAID setup other than zero isn’t that pretty safe for a consumer?
These are overkill for my backup needs, what I really want is one of the “My Cloud” devices that can backup phones.
Click to expand...

Data is NEVER safe, best you can hope for is to manage risk, spend when you have to keep risk low, don't when you don't have to.

Motherboard failed, and raid controller was on it, recovery was a very slow and messy process, hence my current plan to stick with JBOD and a disconnected mirror once a month or so. I don't think different raid chips and/or drivers are compatible with each other.

I've got three older cheap nas, that one day either didn't work at all, or data? what data, do you want to format the drive?
 
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SamirD

Golden Member
Jun 12, 2019
1,489
276
126
www.huntsvillecarscene.com
mikeford said:
Data is NEVER safe, best you can hope for is to manage risk, spend when you have to keep risk low, don't when you don't have to.

Motherboard failed, and raid controller was on it, recovery was a very slow and messy process, hence my current plan to stick with JBOD and a disconnected mirror once a month or so. I don't think different raid chips and/or drivers are compatible with each other.

I've got three older cheap nas, that one day either didn't work at all, or data? what data, do you want to format the drive?
Click to expand...
Really good point about the raid controller and other hardware aside from the drives. These can easily toast you when they fail.

Most nas units these days are just using standard ext4 partitions in jbod so booting up a linux session can quickly get your data accessible again after hardware failures other than a drive. I too use jbod the same way you do even after having raid5 setups since the 1990s--it's just safer.

The great thing about multiple nas units that all have the same data--when it asks you to format it, you can just answer yes and the next regular backup puts all the data back. :D
 
Charlie22911

Charlie22911

Senior member
Mar 19, 2005
614
228
116
If your data doesn't exist in more than one place, then it doesn't exist. RAID isn't a backup, follow the 3-2-1 rule, blah blah blah. We're all above average users, we know the drill.

If you have a trusted friend/family member, pick one of these up with a raspberry pi and setup a remote backup for just over $200. If you want to get fancy, pick up two of each and setup syncthing. I have almost this exact setup to replicate important files\photos from my unRAID box to a family members house.
 
Steltek

Steltek

Diamond Member
Mar 29, 2001
3,042
753
136
killster1 said:
i guess you missed where i said 10tb WD not 10tb seagate ;( i wont buy a seagate, maybe they have changed but the one you listed has 3 out of 5 stars not a glowing easy purchase for me.
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I just had to return two 4TB Reds to Newegg about two weeks ago because they inexplicably wouldn't work in my sister's NAS (kept dropping out as defective despite diagnostics saying they were fine). Turns out they were almost certainly submarined SMR drives disguised as normal ones. I would not be shocked if these crap drives start showing up in all the USB externals from WD very, very soon.

In short, better grab up the old stock while you can - WD is very soon going to join Seagate as a crap company with crap products.
 
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