8TB WD My Book, what's inside?

I was gonna get the 6TB Toshibas until I saw this. Now I don't know.
 
These are the 8TB reds with maybe modified firmware, I was getting errors when just doing file copies but hitting retry would fix it. So it is like they time out rather fast unlike regular firmware which takes a while to give an error and most of the time a retry would not fix it and you would have to skip that file. The drives do run cool though but they are heavy, the USB board will only work with the included drive but they dont have any translation so you can hook it to a sata port and recover data. Unless you want to use them in a NAS setup the seagate 8TB SMR drives with new firmware works just as good. to store data but is $50 cheaper. The HGST drive also draws more power compared to the WDC drives but it seems the HGST parts last longer though. Not enough time to see which would last longer and such as of now. I thought the SMR drives would be really slow but they are not. The PMR areas are now in-between the SMR bands so the cache writing is much faster and they hit over 100MB speeds after the half way point and even in the SMR bands the speeds are around 80MB/sec.. The SMR bands seems to be mostly in the first half of the drive. I saw that newly released seagate drives are far more reliable than ones which are mature. So I am hoping this is the case with the 8TB as well. Speeds over all seem very similar between both the WDC and Seagates over all. Other than the WDC having 7 platters and 14 heads and the seagates 6 platters and 12 heads just like the 6TB version so the 6TB must use more PMR areas. Like the 12TB WDC SMR drives which can be programmed I think we might be able to over clock the 6TB seagates into an 8TB drive if we can get some inside info..
 
It's for ZFS. I'm looking to sell off all my 3,4,5 TB drives for fewer larger ones. Thanks for the notes. As far as SMR goes though, I won't be going there.

I love the performance of the Toshibas, I have a few of the 5TB and they are great, but they are noisy and dissipate more heat. I think I'd be willing to trade for cool and quiet 5k drives since the larger ones do perform pretty well as it is. I think the 8TB reds would be perfectly fine as long as they aren't crippled. Though of course if those external WD's could be found still with He8's I would grab them without hesitation. Need to give it some thought.
 
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I bet a rural area best buy might have a few on the back shelf that were never bought. Probably not very many though. It's all good.
 
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