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 IIRC, WD have good hardware, but the firmwares can be dodgy. (There's a couple of specific versions that are known very bad).
Seagate have decent firmware, but the hardware has a tendency to go phut.
Not sure what the drawbacks of Hitachi are.
I tend to go for Hitachi or WD.
[Edit: This is for HDDs.]
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@ratsnakegames @mcc I suppose the "fake" here would be "a drive that was retired from a datacenter, had its power on hours reset, and has a totally non-suspicious ten billion head un/loading events on it".
@rotopenguin @mcc in the flash/SSD space, the "fake" is usually "a 128MB flash drive with a controller that lies and claims to be 2TB large, then writes your data into nowhere, and also WD definitely didn't make it"
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@mcc IIRC, WD have good hardware, but the firmwares can be dodgy. (There's a couple of specific versions that are known very bad).
Seagate have decent firmware, but the hardware has a tendency to go phut.
Not sure what the drawbacks of Hitachi are.
I tend to go for Hitachi or WD.
[Edit: This is for HDDs.]
@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?
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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
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.
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@rotopenguin @mcc in the flash/SSD space, the "fake" is usually "a 128MB flash drive with a controller that lies and claims to be 2TB large, then writes your data into nowhere, and also WD definitely didn't make it"
@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
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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 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.
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@rotopenguin @mcc in the flash/SSD space, the "fake" is usually "a 128MB flash drive with a controller that lies and claims to be 2TB large, then writes your data into nowhere, and also WD definitely didn't make it"
@ratsnakegames love seeing the 8TB Lenovo microSD cards on Aliexpress
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@ratsnakegames love seeing the 8TB Lenovo microSD cards on Aliexpress
@rotopenguin yeah, like, ideally don't buy those
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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.
