Are Western Digital drives trustworthy these days.
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Are Western Digital drives trustworthy these days. If I want to buy a pretty big non-flash hard drive for "backup and throw in a drawer" purposes, is this a good choice
@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...
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Are Western Digital drives trustworthy these days. If I want to buy a pretty big non-flash hard drive for "backup and throw in a drawer" purposes, is this a good choice
@mcc I’ve only had WD drives die of old age. (As in several years actually powered on.)
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@rotopenguin yeah, like, ideally don't buy those
@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.
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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.
@CliftonR hm interesting, that will require an enclosure though I guess
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Are Western Digital drives trustworthy these days. If I want to buy a pretty big non-flash hard drive for "backup and throw in a drawer" purposes, is this a good choice
@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.
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Are Western Digital drives trustworthy these days. If I want to buy a pretty big non-flash hard drive for "backup and throw in a drawer" purposes, is this a good choice
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Are Western Digital drives trustworthy these days. If I want to buy a pretty big non-flash hard drive for "backup and throw in a drawer" purposes, is this a good choice
@mcc
You'll pay this a premium+ price, or more. -
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@mcc If the seller is Amazon, no, you should be fine.
If Amazon is just shipping from their warehouse, vendors have managed to get fakes in there in the past.
@ratsnakegames @mcc it's an extra $20 but it might be worth buying it directly from WD
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@CliftonR hm interesting, that will require an enclosure though I guess
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.
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Are Western Digital drives trustworthy these days. If I want to buy a pretty big non-flash hard drive for "backup and throw in a drawer" purposes, is this a good choice
@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.
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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.
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@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.
@Kimiko_0 is the quality level of a 2010 WD drive necessarily equal to the quality level of a 2026 WD drive?
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@Kimiko_0 is the quality level of a 2010 WD drive necessarily equal to the quality level of a 2026 WD drive?
@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.
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@darkling if i am looking at a specific WD drive, is there a way of finding out if it's one with a dodgy firmware?
@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. -
Are Western Digital drives trustworthy these days. If I want to buy a pretty big non-flash hard drive for "backup and throw in a drawer" purposes, is this a good choice
@mcc@mastodon.social Don't buy portable HDDs. They're mostly SMR and prone to damage.
Get a Purple (surveillance), Red Pro (NAS), Black (performance) or Gold (datacenter, but very pricey, only if you've got the money) if you're going for WD drives. Get a decent enclosure (there are a lot of cheap but unstable enclosure on the market), too. -
@mcc@mastodon.social Don't buy portable HDDs. They're mostly SMR and prone to damage.
Get a Purple (surveillance), Red Pro (NAS), Black (performance) or Gold (datacenter, but very pricey, only if you've got the money) if you're going for WD drives. Get a decent enclosure (there are a lot of cheap but unstable enclosure on the market), too.I would remind everyone that WD screwed every customer with the SMR debacle not long ago. They flat out, lied about their components, and rendered NAS devices useless for those expecting ultra-reliable hardware.
My experience with WD externals, ala 'Passport' and 'MyBook', is that they struggle to stay connected and fluctuate wildly in transfer speeds.
I switched over to Seagate IronWolfe, or at least Barracuda for desktops, and EXO or Helium filled.
The Cost Per Gigabyte of Hard Drives Over Time
For hard drive prices, the race to zero is over: nobody won. As you’ll see, the hard drive pricing curve has flattened out.
Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup (www.backblaze.com)
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I would remind everyone that WD screwed every customer with the SMR debacle not long ago. They flat out, lied about their components, and rendered NAS devices useless for those expecting ultra-reliable hardware.
My experience with WD externals, ala 'Passport' and 'MyBook', is that they struggle to stay connected and fluctuate wildly in transfer speeds.
I switched over to Seagate IronWolfe, or at least Barracuda for desktops, and EXO or Helium filled.
The Cost Per Gigabyte of Hard Drives Over Time
For hard drive prices, the race to zero is over: nobody won. As you’ll see, the hard drive pricing curve has flattened out.
Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup (www.backblaze.com)
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I would remind everyone that WD screwed every customer with the SMR debacle not long ago. They flat out, lied about their components, and rendered NAS devices useless for those expecting ultra-reliable hardware.
My experience with WD externals, ala 'Passport' and 'MyBook', is that they struggle to stay connected and fluctuate wildly in transfer speeds.
I switched over to Seagate IronWolfe, or at least Barracuda for desktops, and EXO or Helium filled.
The Cost Per Gigabyte of Hard Drives Over Time
For hard drive prices, the race to zero is over: nobody won. As you’ll see, the hard drive pricing curve has flattened out.
Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup (www.backblaze.com)
@lumiworx@mastodon.social @mcc@mastodon.social
Yeah that's why I said "Red Pro", not "Red", because "WD Red" is where WD slipped SMR in. Damn them.
Also isn't Seagate Barracuda also have a few SMR models? -
@lumiworx@mastodon.social @mcc@mastodon.social
Yeah that's why I said "Red Pro", not "Red", because "WD Red" is where WD slipped SMR in. Damn them.
Also isn't Seagate Barracuda also have a few SMR models?For Barracuda... yes, most have SMR until you get to the 'Pro' series, which are mostly CMR.
I suggested "at least a Baracuda" as they were engineered to be business-class drives and had better performance for standard hard drives. If you're stuck at purchase time with fewer choices, then they will offer a minimum of quality for heavier demand users.
After getting stung on 3 consecutive WD Red failures after the silent switch over from CMR to SMR... ugh!
