WD 12TB Elements $175 @ Newegg Starts at 12pm PT

Considering it. Are there any good internal drives with similar price/capacity? How is reliability for internal vs these external solutions in this price range?
 
Can the hard drives be removed from stock case to use in a desktop pc as eveyday storage?
 
Can the hard drives be removed from stock case to use in a desktop pc as eveyday storage?

Yes, but you might have a 3V pin issue, and you'll have to use either a molex to SATA power adapter or otherwise disable the 3V pin.
 
are these smr or cmr
Should be CMR.

If you get one, let me know what model you got. I bought one a few months ago (EMFZ) and one a couple of weeks ago (EDAZ) and they have different model numbers.

WD-12TB-Drives-Models.jpg
 
are these smr or cmr
As I recall, there are no 12/14TB SMR drives (at least none were on the list that WD released)


Promo hasn't started yet, but this seemed like a pretty good deal.

"12 HRs Only! **Promo starts at 12:00PM PT, 07/15/2020 and expires at 11:59PM PT, 07/15/2020."

https://www.newegg.com/black-wd-ele...ternalHardDrives-_-22234406-S2A2D&ignorebbr=1

Thanks for posting this. Decided to pick one up. Probably keep it in the enclosure (for a change) to back up my media from my NAS.
 
Last edited:
These drives are only 5400 RPM? Would it be good enough to stream BR rips off of? Still haven't got a dedicated NAS yet and would just hook it up to my Rpi 4 like I have my current external setup with a Samba share.
 
LOL, these are $400 where I live, while the 14TB version is roughly $550.
 
These drives are only 5400 RPM? Would it be good enough to stream BR rips off of? Still haven't got a dedicated NAS yet and would just hook it up to my Rpi 4 like I have my current external setup with a Samba share.

Yes, I think so. I had a couple in my Synology NAS and never had an issue with streaming.
 
I have used 5XXX rpm drives for streaming for over a decade. No problems with concurrent recording and watching of multiple streams. With that said I use individual drives and not real time raid however snapraid.
 
I also use shucked drives in my PLEX server, 40TB worth - never had a single issue with any of em.

...I actually wish my old, somehow still going strong 3TB would bite the dust already so I'd have a valid reason to remove it. Instead it has a flawless record and is currently standing at 2089 days powered on. (5.7 years! It's also my torrent drive,so its been BUSY all those years.)
 
Last edited:
These drives are only 5400 RPM? Would it be good enough to stream BR rips off of? Still haven't got a dedicated NAS yet and would just hook it up to my Rpi 4 like I have my current external setup with a Samba share.
These drives can read/write at 150+MB/s
Blurays are what, 7MB/s

If you want 7200rpm,
you can get these when they are on sale
IMG_6685.JPEG
These come in 8 and 12TB are HGST 7200 drives

btw, the 12TB Easystore came in today and is an EMFZ drive.
 
Last edited:
These drives can read/write at 150+MB/s
Blurays are what, 7MB/s

If you want 7200rpm,
you can get these when they are on sale
View attachment 262205
These come in 8 and 12TB are HGST 7200 drives

btw, the 12TB Easystore came in today and is an EMFZ drive.
I stream uncompressed 4K images from the 5400 rpm drives. Theoretically there may be some movie that they can't handle, but I haven't come across one yet. We'll see what happens when they put LOTR out in 4K.
 
Honestly, I never wanted anything less than 7200 rpm back in the day.

Those SCSI drives he posted are beasts at 12 TB/s and for $180 that's a steal
 
is this drive a good investment for JUST a gaming drive? IE COD Warzone? or this is just for pictures/movies best use case scenario?

an advice would be greatly appreciated.
 
Last edited:
As an Amazon Associate, HardForum may earn from qualifying purchases.
It won't work without a SAS HBA and SAS cable I discussed. SATA drives can connect to SAS controllers but not the other way around.

You could purchase a proper SAS3 HBA and cable but that will be more expensive.

HBA:
https://www.amazon.com/LSI-Broadcom-9300-8i-PCI-Express-Profile/dp/B00DSURZYS/ref=sr_1_2?crid=1FC49ORJUX1PE&dchild=1&keywords=lsi+sas+9300-4i&qid=1597852650&s=electronics&sprefix=lsi+9300+4i,electronics,145&sr=1-2

Cable:
https://www.amazon.com/CableDeconn-...breakout&qid=1597852692&s=electronics&sr=1-16
 
As an Amazon Associate, HardForum may earn from qualifying purchases.
You won't get a 12TB SSD for anywhere near $187 though..However I do agree there is a quite a performance difference.
 
jcagara08 are you talking about this drive (discussed today a few posts above): https://www.cdw.com/search/?key=ST12000NM0278&outlet=1&sortby=priceasc&maxrecords=72&pcurrent=1 I thought you were but then you said external and that is an internal SAS3 drive.

Oh now I get it you guys are discussing about an internal HDD other than the one posted by OP but it takes hurdles to be used normally in a desktop eh?;

Capture 2.JPG


Oh I have not seen this internal HDD yet, I was talking about the external HDD provided by OP, its an external WD HDD;

Capture.JPG


Oh the dilemma and confusion continues for me
 
Oh now I get it you guys are discussing about an internal HDD other than the one posted by OP but it takes hurdles to be used normally in a desktop eh?;

Exactly, the Seagate Exos X14 ST12000NM0278 is a great price if you have a SAS2 or SAS3 HBA but more expensive and complicated if you don't
 
Last edited:
Got the 14 TB drive a few weeks ago and set up on my Pi 4 shared out with samba. Was somewhat underwhelmed with the 20-30 MB/s transfer speeds I was getting despite it being about the same as the old 2TB external I have hooked up to it as well.

Thought maybe there was some optimizations I could do and also was curious if there was much of a jump between the previous Pis and the 4 considering the old ones didn't even have a true gigabit Ethernet adapter since it was tied to and bottlenecked by the USB 2 controller (480 Mb/s cap before sharing that bandwidth with everything else on the bus). Which led me to this article showing the Pi 4 saturating a gigabit connection with transfers to an external USB drive at around 120 MB/s. The key takeaway I saw there was that it was using the XFS file system, which I wasn't familiar with at all but it cites it is typically used with NAS applications.

Of course this drive came pre-formated as NTFS, which I had just realized is not natively supported with Linux and remembered I had to install an additional package to support it with my old external drive. So I looked up a guide to convert my external to XFS, which I had to install another XFS package for Linux to support. Blew away my NTFS partition with the Gparted tool in Raspbian, which also changed the UUID and Label so I had to update that in the "fstab" config file to mount it again, then chmod the permissions back to 777 on the partition to get permissions back on it, and I was up and running with this:

1597947203700.png


Saturating a gigabit connection to a 5400 RPM drive, so I can't get any better than that I suppose, even with a proper NAS. Given that I'm the only one using it at the moment and there's no redundancy, I'm pretty impressed that I was able to quadruple my transfer speeds to a drive by changing the file system alone. I'm also surprised at how fast the drive is itself and am pretty sure I'm at or near the drives maximum speed as well, so I probably wouldn't get any better speeds even if it was directly connected via USB 3. To top it off, looking at htop on the Pi is showing CPU utilization during transfers is considerably lower as well compared to NTFS, which would be around 60-80% before and now is staying between 30-50% during transfers so it should interfere less with all the other services I have running on this thing. :D
 
Last edited:
I'm pretty impressed that I was able to quadruple my transfer speeds to a drive by changing the file system alone.
XFS or EXT4 are native Linux staples; NTFS isn't well supported with freely available tools / drivers. Works in a pinch, wouldn't use it to actually do work on Linux, etc. Of course NTFS works much better on Windows.
 
XFS or EXT4 are native Linux staples; NTFS isn't well supported with freely available tools / drivers. Works in a pinch, wouldn't use it to actually do work on Linux, etc. Of course NTFS works much better on Windows.

Yeah, I saw a couple debates elsewhere about whether XFS or EXT4 is better for transfer speeds in this kind of application, but given the results I saw in that original article, I figured I couldn't do better than that anyways with this slower drive so I went with it and am sure EXT4 couldn't have been better considering my NIC and the drive itself seem to be the only two bottlenecks in my transfer speeds. I just thought it was cool to figure out something like this too and make the drive that much better for it. I still plan on getting a proper NAS at some point, but given that I don't really need any more storage for now and will only be using this for game/media backups and some light streaming to only one device at a time, this should work well for the time being.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top