8TB shuckable hard drive $121

So tempting. Was just looking at the 4tb WD Ultrastar for $128.

How would long term reliability compare?
 
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So tempting. Was just looking at the 4tb WD Ultrastar for $128.

How would long term reliability compare?
Based on the specs and warranty, you can expect more life out of the ultrastar since it's enterprise quality.

That being said, it really depends on how you use each drive. Enterprise drives are designed for 24x7 always on reliability, whereas consumer ones not so much. I know that people that have shucked these drives in the past and put them in nas units were disappointed with failures and errors within months, but these could have been soft errors and not hard ones. Still, I actually have 2x of the 10TB version of these for off-site backups that we rotate each week so they can still be useful on many other applications.
 
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I have 4 of these that have been in use for 2+ years so far with no issues. They are in my media server and run 24/7/365.
 
I have 4 of these that have been in use for 2+ years so far with no issues. They are in my media server and run 24/7/365.
This can be the case, but if one needs this to be the case, the enterprise class drives will deliver this reliability without any doubt.
 
Deal does seem dead. Just as well. Reliability of the Ultrastar is more my speed anyway.
 
Deal does seem dead. Just as well. Reliability of the Ultrastar is more my speed anyway.
I"ve got several of these drives running 24x7 and never had a problem and IME< if a drive lasts over a year, it will last longer than 5 years (somewhere around 7 seems to be the mode). My guess is 5 years from now, I'll be in the process of changing these to larger drivers (hopefully 16TB or larger).
 
I"ve got several of these drives running 24x7 and never had a problem and IME< if a drive lasts over a year, it will last longer than 5 years (somewhere around 7 seems to be the mode). My guess is 5 years from now, I'll be in the process of changing these to larger drivers (hopefully 16TB or larger).
By these do you mean the shuckable or the Ultrastar? Just confirming.
 
By these do you mean the shuckable or the Ultrastar? Just confirming.
WD Elements (and easy store for that matter). I've shucked both both Reds and White Label and had no failures. I'm sure some have failed, but myself asid,e I don't recall many (any?) complaining about failing shucked 8TB WD drives. But my overall experience spans decades of HD use. I honestly don't think I had a drive failure in my first 10 years owning computers and the only ones that failed in the first 17 were some maxtors. All the others were retired before failure. For WDs, most that failed were around the 7 year mark.
 
WD Elements (and easy store for that matter). I've shucked both both Reds and White Label and had no failures. I'm sure some have failed, but myself asid,e I don't recall many (any?) complaining about failing shucked 8TB WD drives. But my overall experience spans decades of HD use. I honestly don't think I had a drive failure in my first 10 years owning computers and the only ones that failed in the first 17 were some maxtors. All the others were retired before failure. For WDs, most that failed were around the 7 year mark.
The people that I saw complaining about failures were on the servethehome forum and maybe even slickdeals (can't remember now). I've seen drives fail by all manufacturers having worked with drives since the 1990s when SCSI and IDE were still the main interfaces as RLL and ESDI were phased out. I've even seen enterprise class drives like the WDC RE3 fail after a year but still within the 5yr warranty.

What I've learned from my experience is that if you need reliability, get something specifically built for it--back in the day that meant SCSI, and while today's SAS drives don't have as drastic increase in reliability when compared to enterprise class drives SATA, there's a 5 year warranty on enterprise drives for a reason vs the 2-3yr on consumer drives.

Edit: found the sth link:
https://www.servethehome.com/wd-wd100emaz-easystore-10tb-external-backup-drive-review/
 
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I have 3 of the shucked 10TB drives in my home server and have never had a problem with them.
 
I have 3 of the shucked 10TB drives in my home server and have never had a problem with them.
And there's a lot of people that haven't. Just saying that if you really can't afford to have a problem, use enterprise drives as they're designed, made, and marketed for those that can't afford it. And there's places to find these drives less than msrp as well that are legit sources.
 
The people that I saw complaining about failures were on the servethehome forum and maybe even slickdeals (can't remember now). I've seen drives fail by all manufacturers having worked with drives since the 1990s when SCSI and IDE were still the main interfaces as RLL and ESDI were phased out. I've even seen enterprise class drives like the WDC RE3 fail after a year but still within the 5yr warranty.

What I've learned from my experience is that if you need reliability, get something specifically built for it--back in the day that meant SCSI, and while today's SAS drives don't have as drastic increase in reliability when compared to enterprise class drives SATA, there's a 5 year warranty on enterprise drives for a reason vs the 2-3yr on consumer drives.

Edit: found the sth link:
https://www.servethehome.com/wd-wd100emaz-easystore-10tb-external-backup-drive-review/
That makes sense for businesses, but for home use, IME, that's not an issue. Yes, some drives die eary, but it's rare. I ran WD green drives 24x7 for years and most died after roughly 7 years. I also had a few drives that died within a year, but that's it. But if you're running a web server or some commercial sort of nas, then yeah, pay the big bucks (it's good for business plus it's just a tax write of).

I use to run scsi (as I recall they were faster), but I wouldnt' pay a premium for something better for my home systems. Why bother? As I said, drives typically survive 7 years (IME), but even if it's just 5, who cares? 5 years from now, the biggest drives will be at least 32TB (if you go by recent trends). 2011 the first 4TB drive came out. 2014 the first 8tb. 2018 the first 16TB. It's likely by 2023 we'll have 32TB drives. I fully expect I'll be replacing 8TB drives before they die. I may have one die before then, but I've got spares waiting to be swapped in.
 
That makes sense for businesses, but for home use, IME, that's not an issue. Yes, some drives die eary, but it's rare. I ran WD green drives 24x7 for years and most died after roughly 7 years. I also had a few drives that died within a year, but that's it. But if you're running a web server or some commercial sort of nas, then yeah, pay the big bucks (it's good for business plus it's just a tax write of).

I use to run scsi (as I recall they were faster), but I wouldnt' pay a premium for something better for my home systems. Why bother? As I said, drives typically survive 7 years (IME), but even if it's just 5, who cares? 5 years from now, the biggest drives will be at least 32TB (if you go by recent trends). 2011 the first 4TB drive came out. 2014 the first 8tb. 2018 the first 16TB. It's likely by 2023 we'll have 32TB drives. I fully expect I'll be replacing 8TB drives before they die. I may have one die before then, but I've got spares waiting to be swapped in.
Yep, the use probably makes a difference, although I've had drives fail that didn't have much use as well as those that were constantly used. (Oddly enough it seems that I've seen more failures of drives that sat for a while as opposed to used constantly.) For me, I just search for deals on enterprise drives and pick them up when I can because like you said, you've got the next biggest size coming down the pipeline faster than you can fill it.
 
And there's a lot of people that haven't. Just saying that if you really can't afford to have a problem, use enterprise drives as they're designed, made, and marketed for those that can't afford it. And there's places to find these drives less than msrp as well that are legit sources.

I looked at your CDW deals and saw you posted a 14TB drive for ~$300. When I went back, it was $450 and I needed a drive right then. No worries though.
 
I looked at your CDW deals and saw you posted a 14TB drive for ~$300. When I went back, it was $450 and I needed a drive right then. No worries though.
Yep, those got taken fast. There's some there that will come down a week or two, but that's the timing of things, right?
 
Did anyone ever find out if there's air or helium in those WD white label (and or red label) drives?

And for the price of these drives, may as well just make sure you have a backup copy of your data and then ride 'em until they fail, or become too small to be of any real use. I still have two 500GB WD drives from some time in the early to mid 2000's which are going strong in a Netgear readynas duo v1; so long ago, I don't even remember when I bought the damn things. At this point, I'm wondering what's going to die first; the nas or a drive.
BTW for anyone who wants to know, Netgear's readynas duo v2 will work with the WD 10TB drives; you just have to start the install with a drive 1TB or less, then switch to the big ones. I don't know why it won't install on the 10 (or the 8). I put the instructions on each step on Netgear's community forums. Seeing as those nas are now going for $100 or less, and seem to work fine, it makes a decent simple nas. The readynas v1's, however, max out at 2TB drives. If you decide to try one of the v2's, be careful; Netgear labeled a lot of the last batch of v1's as v2's. The v2 is the one with the 3" exhaust fan (full width of the nas box).
 
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Yep, those got taken fast. There's some there that will come down a week or two, but that's the timing of things, right?
And those require no mod to use on a regular connection? I need 2 more drives for a Raid 6 setup I am doing of 5x8TB drives.
Thanks!
 
What a mother-schucker. Missed another schuckabilly party. Got a bare 4TB Red for the backup array instead.
 
Did anyone ever find out if there's air or helium in those WD white label (and or red label) drives?

And for the price of these drives, may as well just make sure you have a backup copy of your data and then ride 'em until they fail, or become too small to be of any real use. I still have two 500GB WD drives from some time in the early to mid 2000's which are going strong in a Netgear readynas duo v1; so long ago, I don't even remember when I bought the damn things. At this point, I'm wondering what's going to die first; the nas or a drive.
BTW for anyone who wants to know, Netgear's readynas duo v2 will work with the WD 10TB drives; you just have to start the install with a drive 1TB or less, then switch to the big ones. I don't know why it won't install on the 10 (or the 8). I put the instructions on each step on Netgear's community forums. Seeing as those nas are now going for $100 or less, and seem to work fine, it makes a decent simple nas. The readynas v1's, however, max out at 2TB drives. If you decide to try one of the v2's, be careful; Netgear labeled a lot of the last batch of v1's as v2's. The v2 is the one with the 3" exhaust fan (full width of the nas box).
I think the STH article linked above does mention if these are helium or not.

Great info about the readynas units. :)
 
And those require no mod to use on a regular connection? I need 2 more drives for a Raid 6 setup I am doing of 5x8TB drives.
Thanks!
Yep, just good solid enterprise class drives at a good price. I get all our drives in the outlet now as it's always cheaper than brand new.

And if you've got sas capability, some of the sas drives can be even cheaper.
 
Yep, just good solid enterprise class drives at a good price. I get all our drives in the outlet now as it's always cheaper than brand new.

And if you've got sas capability, some of the sas drives can be even cheaper.
Thank you, I will grab 2 then! Guess its bye bye warranty after you remove them from the enclosure :D
 
Did anyone ever find out if there's air or helium in those WD white label (and or red label) drives?
Helium for the 8TB and larger.

Code:
 22 Helium_Level            0x0023   100   100   025    Pre-fail  Always       -       100


Based on the specs and warranty, you can expect more life out of the ultrastar since it's enterprise quality.

That being said, it really depends on how you use each drive. Enterprise drives are designed for 24x7 always on reliability, whereas consumer ones not so much. I know that people that have shucked these drives in the past and put them in nas units were disappointed with failures and errors within months, but these could have been soft errors and not hard ones. Still, I actually have 2x of the 10TB version of these for off-site backups that we rotate each week so they can still be useful on many other applications.

What hard drive manufacturer did you say you work for? And don't tell Backblaze this info. Their entire business model is based around desktop drives and will come crashing down.
 
I would move up from 6tb's to 10 or 12tb drives but don't think my Perc H700 can handle that big.
 
Theres no warranty/void sticker on them if you're careful about it you could reassemble for warranty submission.

It's pretty hard to get them apart without breaking the tabs inside. Out of 3 of them, I've gotten 1 of them apart tabs intact. The other two not so much...
 
It's pretty hard to get them apart without breaking the tabs inside. Out of 3 of them, I've gotten 1 of them apart tabs intact. The other two not so much...
Are you using the cut up credit card method? I've shucked 15 of them so far only breaking the first one trying to figure it out using this (they're no longer red generally but same process):
 
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Yes, I was doing that, but it takes a few to get the hang of it. If you're only doing it for one drive and you've never done it before, you'll probably break some tabs.
 
It's not held together like you might think it is. Most electronics like this "snap" together in various places around the enclosure (think laptops, etc.) so you'd use a spudger and a twisting motion to release the tabs. If you do that, you'll snap the clips with these drives. In this case, you have to insert the credit card strips simply to keep the lip of the tab from locking on the clip and then pull the housing away from tab toward the back of the enclosure and then pull the part holding the drive out toward the back. It's not complicated once you see it, but if you've never seen it, it's hard to describe.
 
It works best if you use 4 small pieces of credit card inserted in each of the tabs and slide it apart all at once.
 
I also use old credit cards or some of those plastic "fake" cards that I get in the mail for CC applications. Something plastic, thin, and flexible. Work it into the seam somewhere in the middle (never start at an edge) and work the card in and around.... GO SLOW
 
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