Are Western Digital drives trustworthy these days.

[cliftonr@wandering.shop]

@mcc

If you get the Western Digital "Red" product line of drives, which are officially blessed and branded for NAS use, they're very good and very stable.

I have found over time that across several manufacturers it's worth buying hard drives labeled for NAS use, because they seem to be built and tested to higher standards, so I now use them for backups as well.

[ratsnakegames@mastodon.social]

@rotopenguin @mcc anyway, you can avoid these if you pay attention (don't buy suspicious looking shit and look at the packaging carefully), and Amazon will generally refund them

[darkling@mstdn.social]

@mcc You can get the firmware number out of the SMART info. I don't think there's a published list of known bad drives (for reasons of avoiding lawsuits), but I can ask someone I know on the btrfs IRC channel who keeps such a list for work purposes.

Model number and firmware version, if you have hands on the specific device.

[rotopenguin@mastodon.social]

@ratsnakegames love seeing the 8TB Lenovo microSD cards on Aliexpress

[ratsnakegames@mastodon.social]

@rotopenguin yeah, like, ideally don't buy those

[darkling@mstdn.social]

@mcc Hmm... just spotted that this is an external drive. Those have two additional problems: it connects via USB, which is often flaky and can drop writes if you have the wrong USB hardware on the host (or in the enclosure); and the model numbers on the wrapper don't necessarily correspond to the same drive model internally.

Anyway, I'll ask...

[schrotthaufen@mastodon.social]

@mcc I’ve only had WD drives die of old age. (As in several years actually powered on.)

[rotopenguin@mastodon.social]

@ratsnakegames there's another version of flash card fraud going around, cards that *do* possess the advertised size. These are included with a lot of emulation systems, I don't know if they have escaped containment into any other market yet.

The thing with them is, the cards come loaded with stuff, you can write to them somewhat, but they die from a wholesale rewrite. I suspect that they are leaving out the erase circuitry, for however much die space/process steps that saves.

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@CliftonR hm interesting, that will require an enclosure though I guess

[ayla@mastodon.ounce.zone]

@mcc yeah. I've had a couple usb WD hdds over the years, they've always been stable and their USB implementation is better than most of the generic caddies. Wouldn't recommend doing RAID or anything similarly fancy on it but for a single drive setup, absolutely fine.

[mhoye@cosocial.ca]

@mcc @gnomon knows.

[un_bourguignon@piaille.fr]

@mcc
You'll pay this a premium+ price, or more.

[gnomon@mastodon.social]

@mhoye @mcc you'll get better value for money by buying an internal 3.5" WD mechanical drive and a cheap dock, but that USB drive is fine. Nothing wrong with it.

[gnomon@mastodon.social]

@ratsnakegames @mcc it's an extra $20 but it might be worth buying it directly from WD

https://www.westerndigital.com/en-ca/products/portable-drives/wd-elements-portable-usb-3-0-hdd?sku=WDBU6Y0050BBK-WESN

[cliftonr@wandering.shop]

@mcc

Now I see you're thinking about those portable drive-in-a-box things, I would not trust any brand of those. I've seen too many, of many different brands, abruptly die on people.

My wife has a WD Passport from & for her job, and that's been doing OK but I still wouldn't trust it.

On my desktop computer I use one of the USB-3 to SATA adapter thingies that you can plug any SATA drive into and have it show up.

If you want to carry it around, then ya, you have to figure out an enclosure.

[kimiko_0@wetdry.world]

@mcc Not sure if relevant to an external hdd you'd buy in 2026, but I have had an internal 5TB WD drive running 24/7 for uh, I think it's been 16 years now. So yeah, decent quality there.

[cliftonr@wandering.shop]

@mcc

This, specifically:

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@Kimiko_0 is the quality level of a 2010 WD drive necessarily equal to the quality level of a 2026 WD drive?

[kimiko_0@wetdry.world]

@mcc Considering capitalism, probably not necessarily. That's why I said 'not sure if relevant'. If it came to picking WD or another brand though, I'd pick WD based on my own experience, is what I meant to convey.

[shironeko@fedi.tesaguri.club]

@mcc @darkling
Durability wise any of the big brands are fine. However the intended use case for different SKUs is gonna matter quite a bit for getting reliablily/performance.

These external drives are tricky because they don't specify what actual hard drive is in there. Sometimes they put some decent drives in there for a lower price than internal and people would shuck them, but it's the exception not the rule.

IMO if you just want cheap mass storage and don't care about the performance (the use case these drives are targeting (say it's to store media/backup)) then just look at GB/$ and pick the cheapest. Otherwise, buy a known quality internal drive and put it in an enclosure.