Best Buy 12TB WD Easy Store External HDD 179.99

I just went ahead and bought 10 to replace the 10 x 10tb I bought four months ago. Guess I'm going to have one hell of a ebay sell on 10tb drives. Love these synology nas make you so addicted to storage.
Nice! When you can cycle out drives this fast, short warranties don't matter as much. I wish I had the time. And it seems like you can post them on here and sell out the whole lot pretty quick depending on your price. :)
 
Ill keep you on my radar for sure

Also interested. I had an 8 die (It was quite new, I may have dropped it), but two succumbed to a house fire, though I found a local outfit that was able to recover the data. I have 3 10's and 3 8's, but can use 2-4 more.
 
When I went to shuck drives, I noticed each one was the different model number.

I was hoping to maybe get a Synology and drop both in does it matter that they are different model numbers? Both are 12 TB
 
Last edited:
When I went to shuck drives, I noticed each one was the different model number.

I was hoping to maybe get a Synology and drop both in does it matter that they are different model numbers? Both are 12 TB
As long as they're the same size it doesn't matter.
 
Nice! When you can cycle out drives this fast, short warranties don't matter as much. I wish I had the time. And it seems like you can post them on here and sell out the whole lot pretty quick depending on your price. :)

I've always done the same from the 2tb black , 4tb black,6tb black,8tb reds. I accumulate about 4tb a month of data , plus I keep duplicate box of duplicate drives that sits in safe place. Ive never had a wd drive go bad on me so warranty is never been my concern. hopefully I can lose the lot here within a couple of days SamirD.
 
So are these safe to get or not. That SMR has me worried but I don't know what it is. I just add drives to my server. No raid.

SMR is Shingled magnetic Recording. It's basically a way to cram more data onto a platter. If you think of a simple bar magnet with a N and S pole laid flat on a table, this is how the magnetic bits were originally oriented until manufacturers hit a size limit. They then oriented the magnetic bits as if you had a bar magnet standing on one of its ends to crunch them more tightly together. SMR is the next evolution of the problem of cramming bits as closely together as possible where the magnetic bits are shingled on top of each other, much like how building roofs have layered asphalt shingles.

SMR has a problem though, the write head is too big to accurately write a single track of data, which makes writes to the platter destructive to the shingled layer of magnetic bits above the currently being written ones. This means in order to prevent data loss, the drive has to perform "housekeeping" by re-writing the damaged data done by the previous write. This slows the drive down considerably, which is why SMR drives have large caches, to try and buffer this housekeeping so the drive doesn't fall flat on its face.

These drives are good for slow long term storage, but suck for everything else. Don't use one as a boot drive or you'll have a bad time. I found this out the hard way when I discovered what SMR drives were. I was trying to spin up a simple server and Linux was acting like the drive was failing, but it turns out that SMR drives fall flat on their face doing random I/O and just give up. I returned for a refund as fast as I could and was shocked when I couldn't find a single 2 TB drive on the market that didn't have SMR, when I had bought them just a couple years ago.
 
Can anyone check if the 12TBs (Easystore or Elements) here, or for that matter if "new" 8TB or 10TBs, are Helium drives? I know that certain 8TBs showed they were Helium drives (suggesting they were WD Gold or HGST He8 model based for the while labels) via checking in CrystalDiskInfo.
 
Can anyone check if the 12TBs (Easystore or Elements) here, or for that matter if "new" 8TB or 10TBs, are Helium drives? I know that certain 8TBs showed they were Helium drives (suggesting they were WD Gold or HGST He8 model based for the while labels) via checking in CrystalDiskInfo.

WD makes air 8TB and 10TB drives (the 10TB is new this year), so it's certainly possible that they are shipping in externals. What the odds of getting one are, I have no idea.
 
I've always done the same from the 2tb black , 4tb black,6tb black,8tb reds. I accumulate about 4tb a month of data , plus I keep duplicate box of duplicate drives that sits in safe place. Ive never had a wd drive go bad on me so warranty is never been my concern. hopefully I can lose the lot here within a couple of days SamirD.
That's a lot of data being generated so I can see why you need bigger drives as they hit the market and why warranty won't mean much since you cycle them out before they even get a chance to wear. Yep, this place is great if you've got gear that needs a new home. (y)
 
Can anyone check if the 12TBs (Easystore or Elements) here, or for that matter if "new" 8TB or 10TBs, are Helium drives? I know that certain 8TBs showed they were Helium drives (suggesting they were WD Gold or HGST He8 model based for the while labels) via checking in CrystalDiskInfo.
From pics and discussions on the servethehome forum, I believe it was concluded that they were very likely helium drives. The 12TB looks identical to a 14TB I had that was helium.
 
YMMV but I was able to get 20% off on Samsung Pay. Looks like new Samsung pay accounts on devices not previously used are more likely to see it but yeah its an even sicker deal when combined with 5% off paypal from some credit cards. Comes out to $150 after tax for me instead of $200 after tax which is a pretty darned good $12.5/TB.
 
I just got one today!
I dont know if this is because it is empty but I put it on an OLD usb 3 dock and tested with Crystal Disk Mark..I got 204MB reads and 200MB write. That was VERY unexpected. I am guessing the moment it gets more data is going to drop a lot in speed, right?
Anyways, if its this fast, I may just leave it on that dock and keep the 3TB drive internal I was going to remove. lol
 
I got 204MB reads and 200MB write. That was VERY unexpected.

That is normal. A modern hard drive of this size should have > 200 MB /s large sequential reads and writes on the outer most tracks. However on the inner most tracks expect 1/2 of that.
 
When you tell your friend to shuck your 12TB Easystore, make sure they only take the drive out of the case, not shuck the internals from the drive.

IMG_3921.JPG IMG_3922.JPG
 
That is normal. A modern hard drive of this size should have > 200 MB /s large sequential reads and writes on the outer most tracks. However on the inner most tracks expect 1/2 of that.
Funny thing is that copying a file to it it shows a more realistic speed and less than my other drives but when using CrystalMark it still shows faster than any of my non NVME drives.
tempted to grab one more..heck..I was thinking on replacing all my Server 8TB drives but I am trying to not get carried away LOL
 
Are you copying GB sized files to it from a SSD to the hard drive?


Also your 8 TB drives (unless they are SMR) should be close to 200MB/s with large sequential reads and writes in the outer tracks as well. It's been this fast for a few years since we have had larger than 1TB platters.

Here is a description of SMR:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording
 
Last edited:
I can recall back in the day that there were platter issues with certain sized HDDs, notably the 3TB HDDs which had absolutely abysmal reliability compared to 2TB or 4TB etc... models. I'm to understand the 8TB models are good (for a shucked-storage use etc) and I presume the 10TB as well, but what about the 12TBs? I'm also curious which of them are "good version" in terms of cache, helium, and other bonuses.

Now to decide if its worth going for 8TBs for $120 (Though I've considered buying some of the used 8TBs from existing owners) or 12TBs for $180....
 
I can recall back in the day that there were platter issues with certain sized HDDs, notably the 3TB HDDs which had absolutely abysmal reliability compared to 2TB or 4TB etc... models. I'm to understand the 8TB models are good (for a shucked-storage use etc) and I presume the 10TB as well, but what about the 12TBs? I'm also curious which of them are "good version" in terms of cache, helium, and other bonuses.

Now to decide if its worth going for 8TBs for $120 (Though I've considered buying some of the used 8TBs from existing owners) or 12TBs for $180....
All of the 8-12TB easystore appear to be the same HGST HE10 drives (I would think its a safe guess the 14s are too).

It all depends on your storage speed/space needs and redundancy, keep in mind if you're doing a raid setup with parity the larger the drive the longer the rebuild will take (and increased likely hood another drive will fail during rebuild).
I have room in my cases for 20 drives, I only have half the slots filled with 8's and I have free space still.
One of my coworkers is using 12's since he only has space for 7 drives, we have the same amount of usable space.

So thats the first questions what raid form do you need, whats your max drives, whats the max usable space you think you need?
 
Back
Top