Storage on the Cheap? | WD Easystore 8TB Drive "Shucking"

[@firstmkb]

For people wondering about the price difference between Red and White label drives, it's may be a marketing strategy. If someone is buying for data center, an extended warranty (3 years) hints at better quality and reliability, making it a "safe" choice for the purchasing agent ESPECIALLY if they pay more (of someone else's money). Even wine experts tend to rate a supposedly expensive wine higher than a cheaper wine, in otherwise blind tests. WD also wants to make money by selling to the home market, but knows the buyers are more price conscious. If they price it like the Red drives, buyers will chose another manufacturer, so WD creates the white drive and prices it below the Red one. There may or not be meaningful differences between the variations, but they can always put the "better" drive in the enclosure if they run low on the "cheap" ones. Selling the same product at different prices depending on who the customer is has been a very common strategy called "price discrimination." Airlines do this - cheap "getaway" tickets versus last-minute business travel. Amazon does this to everyone, but doesn't get noticed as much. As far as manufacturing cost, I would be stunned if the Red drives cost more than the White drives, when they seem so similar. The retail drives include better packaging, cable, and power supply - likely more expensive - before Best Buy makes money. I hope this helps somebody, because it was a PITA to type on a tablet!

[@paulmichaelfreedman8334]

High probability that the drives used for external storage aren't as durable as the original RED drives.

[@RealNovgorod]

They are exactly the same, the price difference is only for the warranty. Funny how dumb these companies think the consumers are - they go as far as inventing an entire fake brand instead of just selling the same thing with a shorter warranty for cheaper.

[@firstmkb]

@@RealNovgorod it is part of how human minds work. When generic foods were first introduced into the US, sales were terrible because people associated the lower cost with lower quality. They raised the price of the generics, and sales INCREASED. Wal-Mart and Costco have been replacing generics on the shelves with their "house brands" because people perceive them as having higher quality than generics. Pricing doesn't follow classic economic theory in many cases.

[@RealNovgorod]

@@firstmkb Hm, I thought "house brands" were introduced primarily to eliminate competition and price comparison. In my country some discount supermarkets almost entirely sell house brands, so no more just going for the cheapest price. In the long run this will screw over the fancy-ass brands (which is great) because it encourages the consumer to be brand agnostic and compare the actual content. Noodles are noodles, no matter what brand logo is on the package - much like with hard drives :)...

[@calibermix8159]

@@RealNovgorod the hardware appears to be the same but the firmware maybe not I have read another reviewer who proved that it doesn't support TLER... so it's not suitable for NAS I agree with you that price is based on warranty period BUT the cheap ones can last longer than 2 years so they would be losing money if fewer people buy the 3 years warranty drives

[@burningglory2373]

What it really shows is how much markup the 8 terabyte drive are. If they can afford to sell them for 160-170 with an included shroud and msata adapter, there is no reason to be charging close to 215 for the bare drive. That is 50$ of mark up for essentially what is the stripped down version of the same thing. Honestly sometimes I think it should be the other way around.

[@CafeenMan]

These things are intended for people who don't know much about computers and just need something simple. The drives in them are usually not that great.

[@jamescollins6085]

@@CafeenMan I highly doubt they're rated for 24/7 reliability. If someone desires reliability at a good price, I suggest they instead buy used enterprise equipment. Since they're decommissioned so often, they still have years left in them.

[@B1akTang1dH4rt]

James Collins they are wd red nas drives

[@georgesenda1952]

For my 2010 Imac, OWC wants almost $400 for a bare 2 tb hard drive. My Fuzzy Cat pulled the power strip out of the wall one night and it did something to the 256 mb hard drive. I want to put one in the Mac and put new memory in it and eventually sell it once I upgrade. It was my first NEW Mac back in June 2010 & cost me $1399. I just bought a NEW 1tb WD external Easy Store drive from Best Buy on Ebay for $43.33 with the protection plan, because my internal drive on this early 2008 is going to die eventually. Its my first 1tb drive. A 1tb internal from OWC is around $139, I think. We have come a long way from the Winchester drives I have from Shugart back in the early 1980s. And the 5 1/4 Apple 2 disk drives. Back then 5 MB on a $1200-1500 external drive was huge. And all the home user could buy.

[@georgesenda1952]

@Artisan I worked retail for years. Where did you get the idea that there is NO markup & people just buy whatever the market will bear ? When businesses order products from their supplier for resale, there IS a markup & that gets passed along to the retail customer. It's how companies make a profit !

[@andychow5509]

These are often cheaper than internal drives. What you have to look out for is that 3.3v pin, and the unability to update firmware (sometimes. Happened on the Seagate ones). Otherwise, they are great to add to a raid. Since you have checksum healing (zfs and btrfs), don't worry about data loss if you have sufficient redundancy.

[@custombikedesigns343]

If it's a white drive. You just put a piece of tape over the 3rd pin from data connector : )

[@RexxReviews]

Any idea what makes this different for dedicated NAS drives? Ive noticed an many NAS storage devices you pop them in and they work but with a PC you need to tape that 3rd pin.

[@Elfnetdesigns]

Ok i get that there are some naive sheeple out there but not all of us are uneducated in IT here, WD does not use QR code stamped drives on these devices. They also do not use NASware Reds in them either. All the ones I have seen ever since the 1 Tb era were all white stickered with no QR or barcodes on them. just a plain jane info label like your white drives there.. See the reason for the bar or QR code is for the end user to utilize for warranty and specification information if the drive goes sour like inside a desktop PC. These portable USB storage devices are not intended for the end user to service / upgrade like you would a desktop PC or server, they are use until they fail and trash devices.

[@davesharp9656]

All the ones I have encountered are actually "WD Blue Spec" drives with white stickers. I agree 100%.

[@thesignof33]

@@davesharp9656 You need 8 and above TB drives to get the reds, which are basically rebranded HGST Ultrastars. They should be more reliable than any other drive at that price point.

[@uxsvent1]

did this with my passport a few years ago it was a 2tb but 2.5 size.

[@zak_abass]

@Rock Stone 😂😂

[@iamco698]

Do you have a video about how to get into the internal side of the hard drive where you cann see the disc?

[@donjenkins2465]

I just received an WD easystore from Best Buy Cyber Monday ($119.99) and it's a white label. And of course if you try this and shuck drive, SAVE THE ENCLOSURE!!! You have no warranty without very carefully restoring the drive to external condition. Also real RED drives have a 3 year limited warranty and Easystore have a 2 year warranty. So if you buy a shucked drive on eBay and don't get the enclosure you have NO WARRANTY!!!

[@SyphistPrime]

This is a great technique for building RAIDs, I heard about this but didn't know there's been that much research put into this. Also even if they are reliable you should be backing up data, as well as having some redundancy (f you're not doing a 2 drive RAID 1. I would personally do this if I needed that kind of storage for a local network backup to go along with my cloud backup, but I don't need that kind of storage yet.

[@jfwfreo]

If WD could sell a WD Red in an enclosure for less than the same WD Red on its own, how was that viable? Were they making killer profit on the WD Red NAS drives? Were they taking a big loss on the external drives?

[@SyphistPrime]

My guess is they make good profit on them so they overproduce them and just throw whatever spares they have lying around into these things. That's what most manufacturers for external drives do.

[@ErnestJay88]

the only downside of "Sucking" is, sometimes you got a bad quality drives or lower tier drive, for example, most of WD My Book are Green drives (and White drive that basically green drive with white label) rather than Blue or Red drives, Green drives are the slowest HDD on all WD drives. if you're lucky, you got Red or Blue drive.

[@pedrohack2869]

Return them if it's a bad drive

[@rich1051414]

These have blue, black, or green drives, not red drives. Red drives are the most reliable and most expensive, but not the fastest, and not likely to be sold off as white label at all.

[@calibermix8159]

Blue and Green is the same. so many ignorant people here.

[@peterbreis5407]

Looks like the 8Tb and 10Tb drives are the golden points for price per Tb now. For me I'd still like to know how durable they are because the warranty drops from 3 to 2 years if you shuck them. Also how noisy they are.

[@sk8mike]

Any information on how to fix these or save your data if the SATA board goes bad?

[@bodhi1271]

I wonder how these hold up in the long term being used this way? There must be some reason they're being sold cheaper in these cases, I don't think I would trust it

[@d7rkn1ghtmare64]

i have 6 of them in a raid 6 array and they are still going strong a year and a half later. the white label drives are actually red drives and last a very long time. if properly cooled and put into a computer case they should have no problem making it 4-5 years. remember they are made for 24/7 operation in a server/nas environment.

[@bionicgeekgrrl]

Temp is not quite as important for these drive as vibration. they have designed limits of vibration (most of the difference between red and red pro drives is how many in a system they can cope with within their design tolerance.

[@calibermix8159]

@@bionicgeekgrrl what do you mean ? 7200 rpm = less vibrations ?

[@Ultrajamz]

Interesting, i hear they may even honor warranty anyways? If you get a white, is it worth reboxing, returning it, and trying my luck at another best buy?

[@ShyRage1]

Could I install this after shucking into another external case?

[@Ben-rz9cf]

If they could sell the red drives for half off with extra components then why tf are they still selling them at whole price? i dont understand the logic of their pricing models

[@xmlthegreat]

Cause by putting the red labels and marketing them as NAS level drives, they can get more money. They overprice everything in the range to get a high margin, since HDDs are actually dirt cheap to manufacture right now but prices haven't really fallen in a few years, which means the difference is pure profit.

[@donjenkins2465]

.The difference is the warranty. Red drives have a 3 year limited warranty..and Easystores have a 2 year warranty which you void as soon as you open the case.

[@Fddlstxx]

@@donjenkins2465 as of April 2018 at a federal level in the United States it was determined that such warnings that say void if removed are illegal and cannot be leveraged against consumers. This is from the FTC.

[@donjenkins2465]

@@Fddlstxx Your are dealing with Western Digital and if you send an external drive in for warranty repair without the enclosure they will refuse to repair or replace. BEEN THERE DONE THAT.

[@dfabeagle718]

@@xmlthegreat You get what you pay for. My experience with WD says it's not worth it if they gave them away. 3 days, dead drive. It's brother, who was the exact same drive model and 30 dollars cheaper than the "book"... another 3 days, bought the farm. They are not worth my time to take apart and put in a machine I expect to be able to use. Literally... 3 days hard use, and it's dead Jim. Worthless, not even light consumer duty quality. I didn't bother checking on the warranty, because I wouldn't bother putting any more WD trash in my machines.

[@David_Quinn_Photography]

still, don't get why these are cheaper if they are the same drive, I know WD is making more money off the ones labeled NAS but is there actually any difference? like, do the ones that go in easy store not pass a QA test the other drives do?

[@IDidintUploadNoVDOs]

i have a HP Pavilion. running out of storage space i purchase an WD easystorage 10.9 terabyte. haven’t used it seven time and the darn thing won’t light up. is it possible to remove the chip from the easystorage and please it in the computer? or am i screwed to lose all my saved data that’s on the easystorage?

[@djexotic07]

can i used these as basic drives then raid nas?

[@ThisOLmaan]

AFK :::: did you say you didn't have to cover the pin with Tape???

[@RandomPlaceHolderName]

Newer PSU standards dont deliver power to the 3rd pin iirc.

[@RobertPendell]

@@RandomPlaceHolderName Not necessarily true. It is a hit or miss on that.

[@JUST_ONE_ID10T]

I bought hard drives as non working that were store returns and someone switched the drives on the inside out. so someone scammed the store. sucks as i got stuck with it as it was sold as is. paid way to much as i was thinking it would be under warranty from the serial number sticker showed it was under warranty.

[@juliaset751]

The same thing happened to me: I bought an enclosed drive that was supposed to be 4 TB that was returned, I thought the person who bought it just didn’t understand how to initialize it properly. It turned out to have a 15 year old 250 GB Seagate in it.

[@ltdees2362]

...pretty bad way to learn a lesson...you live and you learn...you should know better❕ This is a classic "double" scam. The retailer gets a credit/kickback from the Mfr for the return, then turns the product on gullible consumers...Only thing the retailer is out, is the hassle with the return. The Mfr turns around and increases the price on their goods to cover their costs for the ass-holes of the world 💋 ...sorry you got ripped..."it is what it is"

[@Robert-ug5hx]

I am running 4 drives on a wd pr4100 in raid 10 I think those would befine as the raid 10 is not complicated where a raid 5 is complicated very hard on hdd's

[@talonts9]

There is NOTHING that makes RAID5 harder on HDs than RAID 10. The "complicated" part is handled *outside* the drives in HW or SW. In fact, RAID 5 is LESS harder on them than 10 if you have a lot of drives, as less data is written to each drive from a file as the drive pool increases.

[@djruido1]

So red label it’s better than black label?

[@d7rkn1ghtmare64]

Black drives are the best performance for single drive setups and they have the longest warranty but red drives are specifically made to work in a raid array with lower power consumption and run at a slower rpm for 24/7 operation. If you want a good deal then the white label drives are the best you can get for the money.

[@jamescollins6085]

Perhaps you have a better chance of getting a Red drive if you buy a used enclosure? The MTBF is high enough on these drives that I can justify it.

[@Natei]

I was thinking the same, but its obviously up for debate because are WD actually doing anything about it or just saying they are. If they were there was no reason he should've got a red drive there. Its a strange part of the market, where you can pick them up cheaper than the raw drives.

[@tekbrick2822]

Why are those cheaper then loose drive?

[@docweird8026]

Warranty, mostly ("chucked" drives have none, really). Some of them also need a compatible power supply / masking 3.3V pin / molex->SATA power adapter to wake them up. Some non-RED drives are also without the NASware firmware.

[@thegreatoutagesign9204]

They are just simply marked up. No reason for the bare drives to be $50 more.

[@therealandycook]

Volume of sales

[@gunbladeuser19]

external drivers are easier to sell. you don't have to know how to install one into a case and motherboard to use it. you just plug in a USB + power cable and you're done. That's a lower bar for everyday customers to reach. Products that move quickly off shelves saves stores time and money.

[@jasonb6570]

@@therealandycook bingo

[@Thelastairbendy]

download link for desktop wallpaper

[@brianm545]

Awesome wallpaper

[@darthvader5300]

One of our engineers has designed and built a 10 TB drive - magnetic tape which is a PLUG AND USE AND NO HUMAN INTERVENTION NEEDED DESIGN. Just connect and plug it into your computer and it has an analog control saying (1) auto-save all computer activities. (2) select-save. (1) saves all computer activities in which you can back track to check your past. (2) is like your American "FAVORITES SYSTEM of AOL". All are hardwired programmed with the Aymara algorithm-FREE BSD UNIX O/S so that it can interface with all kinds of computer programming and hardware and has unlimited backward compatibility and is NON-OBSOLESCENE engineered. No planned obsolescene here. He designed it to be as easy and as permanent like the analog 1970s XEROX photocopying machine.

[@DialM4Microcontrollr]

@AFK I have the Dell poweredge R420 as well. When I put a SATA drive into the SAS on the front of the server, the drive works but will constantly show an Amber light on the front of the system. Is there a way to make these SATA drives work without a flashing amber light on the front of the server?

[@d7rkn1ghtmare64]

my poweredge does that with some sata SSDs so it could just be that your server does not like the drive and thinks it is a bad drive but i have never seen it happen with a normal hdd so check your smart data on the drive.

[@Elfnetdesigns]

@@d7rkn1ghtmare64 You may have another issue that is not the drive itself, For me it was PSU-B that was developing bad capacitors and when I put in an extra drive it was enough to bog the system down and create an error and cause the amber led flash.

[@jamessolomon3467]

in the video, you said you show how to do a burnin, but you never linked to that.

[@RexxReviews]

He actually didn't, he just said if its the drive he wanted he would run it through a burn in, he never stated he would show us that process. A simple 5 second google search will yield all the info you want.

[@nickdoan25]

​@@RexxReviews @8:46

[@nikos327]

Red / White .... you didn't say why the Red was better ?????

[@prodbydramatic]

im reading the comments to find out also lol

[@hussssshie]

It's easy to understand. When it comes with a red label, you can resell that hard drive for almost double the price you paid for it. NAS drives are more stable than normal hard drives, and someone who wants long-term storage will pay for it. Probably the white label drive is the exact same thing, but you can't say for sure it passed the tests to be considered a NAS, as well as not being able to sell it as such.

[@Ultrajamz]

Considering this as I have 2 8’s and 3 6’s in raid 6. To either go all 8’s or swap to all 10’s since those are $160 now... then sell my red labels on ebay.. hm.

[@patbutete1722]

How much capacity out of that vast storage space do you do you actually use?

[@NMHC1978]

what do you use for brning testing the drives

[@MXG000]

What about wd elements ?

[@elbachir4720]

the easystore are only sold in the US (BestBuy?). The elements are the same. You can also do that with the MyDrive. Get the cheapest you can get.

[@Waynes-xt9gr]

the key to opening it up........PUTTY KNIFE!

[@aaronparsons5201]

Did you know that, in response to these videos, the prices of the devices has risen $40 or more in some cases. The stupid ones always ruin it for others. Next time, keep the secrets to yourself, companies aren't as stupid as you might think.

[@jasonb6570]

You sure about that? The 8TBs drop to $125 and the 10TBs to $160 on a pretty regular basis for the last year or two at least.

[@viva7642]

Now, since the pandemic, short coming chips etc etc, hard drives is expensive. :( Look at this 8TB Easystore is now $230, seriously??!!!

[@Ifyoudonttakeitucantfakeit]

I didn’t know what this was about prior to watching and after watching still dont.

[@James-wz5qi]

Didn't work with my seagate 4tb hd. would not work as an internal hd. would not work without the 3.0 adapter attached.

[@patrickjohnson1120]

They should all work as internal drives as they are for the most part all regular internal drives placed into a special enclosure for use as external. Generally speaking you have to delete all partitions on drive and start from scratch as you would with any new hard drive. Otherwise the operating system won't read them or give errors.

[@josuecrespo8386]

Do you still have the encloser for the drives

[@paulmichaelfreedman8334]

WD purple drives are cheaper than RED drives and they are optimised for a max of 64 video streams simultaneously. Ideal for home users.

[@RWL2012]

why do the drive labels say "8.0TB" on them?! they're 8TB; there's no need for the ".0"!!!

[@hussssshie]

That's extremely common practice and almost every manufacturer uses it when its TB. A tenth of a TB is quite a substantial difference. Also, in reality it should be advertised as 7.45TB but somehow they get away with it.

[@xaero1971]

@@hussssshie 8 terabytes is 7.45 tebibytes

[@hussssshie]

I know, the point is it should be advertised as 8.0TiB. Not 8.0TB Imagine you was buying a car for it's performance and it claimed 150HP, but in reality they rounded that up from the real 145HP. Its just false advertising and a practice that should be illegal in most countries. This practice with hard drives has been going on for way too long already

[@xaero1971]

@@hussssshie No, it's advertised correctly. 8.0TB is 8 terabytes which is decimal 8,000,000,000,000 bytes. 7.45 tebibytes is 7.45 x (1024)^4 which is binary equalling 8,000,000,000,000 bytes. It's Windows that has it wrong, not the drive manufacturer. Windows should say 7.45TiB and but it doesn't - this is what confuses people.

[@SeanChYT]

Why use the worst possible cheap drives for your valuable data?

[@AjaxNotFrancis]

In certain RAID configurations, it doesn’t matter if it fails way down the line because of redundancy. This can be extremely cost effective, especially if you follow the procedures like this guy did by checking drive type and burn in

[@SeanChYT]

@@AjaxNotFrancis I am operating 5 different RAID systems, and it's never an enjoyable experience to have reduced redundancy at any time. In a commercial setting you also have to account for the hourly wage of IT staff replacing hot spares and monitoring rebuilding of arrays (or recover from backups). I guess if the stored data, your time and sanity is not valuable to you, I guess.. go ahead. Using bits of tape and additional cable adapters is even worse for reliability. I use cheap drives all the time, and in the beginning I did use drives recovered from USB enclosures, but I quickly realized there is a big reason why they are sold so cheap.

[@phreakedout1]

DC Metro Represent!

[@kian8382]

I may be wrong but if the drive comes with 256MB cache, that could indicate it being SMR, a.k.a NOT GOOD.

[@auerlg]

What is SMR?

[@kian8382]

@@auerlg Google SMR drives and you'll know.

[@BenInSeattle]

SMR: Shingled Magnetic Recording. Means it is slower to write, but reads just as fast as usual. Not a big deal if you're just looking for something to store backups on.

[@PISQUEFrancis]

Western Digital carapp ... look up WD lost data and maybe you'll get an earful(eyeful), of how extremely hard it is to get data off these things if anything happens to one of these drives.

[@ChrisPugh]

can you still get these bad boys?

[@jlump5256]

B.S. You shucked the drives but didn't mount them.

[@JesseSShaw]

Or you can use newegg and get great deals on great storage.

[@toolsonabudget7763]

lol these drives are binned for only occasional usage not for using it daily haha

[@ltdees2362]

...raid-array's are dying dinosaurs...wast of time, effort and money...save your money, do a simple scheduled image backup to a none networked storage device and a cloud service. When the raid fails its a pain in the ass to recover...when you can quickly restore from that image backup in minutes and go on with life...😎

[@hammybunghole4275]

Holly shit WD are the worst Hard drives ever make

[@Djmaxofficial]

Why this exist? FOr usb drive there's better solutions whitout external power. That's my point of view. It's better to buy NAS or jut put that drive in the PC case :)

[@v1ncen715]

offline/offsite backups and archival.

[@coltraindontworryboutit9990]

4:40 lmao people still buy Alienware

[@Elfnetdesigns]

IKR..

[@DaveBoxBG]

But they are 5400 rpm...

[@AFKTech]

Depends on your use and setup. 5400rpm doesn't really pose a large issue unless you're running 10g network, or have multiple clients accessing at once. Otherwise it saves on power, noise, and heat!

[@Energyone]

There are 5400 RPM drives that are faster than some 7200 RPM drives. It all depends on density for the most part. 5400 RPM can still hit 200 on transfers

[@Noises]

@Artisan 5400 rpm = 5400 revolutions per minute. that's what the number means. That's how fast the platter spins, which relates to read speeds. But if you think it's just a number I have some 5400 rpm drives you can buy for 10,000rpm drive prices.

[@gunbladeuser19]

Server systems aren't from gaming speeds. They're built to move data. 5400 RPM moving 128MB x 4 trips = 512 MB moved. vs 7200 RPM moving 64MB x 4 trips = 256 MB moved. Yes the 7200 makes quicker trips, but they move less data. Even on the 7th trip, it's only at 448MB. The 5400 already moved more data.

[@ianskinner1619]

dude, seriously stabilize the camera..

[@pietrocantuccini5584]

Apalling desktop this guy has. Looks like a dog's dinner. He must have lots of time at his hands!

[@SenileOtaku]

"...just to make sure there's nothing blatantly wrong with these drives..." They're Western Digital drives. You're already out of luck there.