WD Easystore External Discussion

i bought one friday when it was still 139. came today, free next day shipping ftw. It's a white drive, but I've heard the white drives are just rebadged red drives? Regardless it didn't work with a regular SATA power cable, had to use an adaptor and it worked right away. 8tb !
 
So now all the drives inside are white labeled WD Reds? That's too bad.

I did a little looking around and you can buy these used for like 110, or new for 130 from best buy on ebay then use 10% ebay bucks, and the WD Red 8TB drives seem to go for like $150.

So it might've been worth getting like 20 and shucking them.

But I can buy the white label drive for 120 so why bother

EDIT: Lol, lots of people selling the shucked drive enclosures on ebay. I guess people found a way to make money doing that
 
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i bought one friday when it was still 139. came today, free next day shipping ftw. It's a white drive, but I've heard the white drives are just rebadged red drives? Regardless it didn't work with a regular SATA power cable, had to use an adaptor and it worked right away. 8tb !

Which adapter did you need? Thanks
 
Which adapter did you need? Thanks
any molex to sata adapter will do. I felt better with those than the tape trick. Drive works flawlessly with any power supply. It also depends on the power supply, some work fine others need an adapter.
 
EDIT: Lol, lots of people selling the shucked drive enclosures on ebay. I guess people found a way to make money doing that

They work great as sata to usb adapters, with or without the plastic enclosure.
 
I see that everyone is removing the drive from the Easystore.
I could do likewise ... putting it in my desktop where it would be connected via SATA at 6 Gbps.

But I'm thinking about leaving it in its enclosure and connecting it via USB 3.0.

So, question: Will it perform as fast via external USB 3 compared to internal SATA???

Technically yes but not in real life. USB has a lot of overhead and is not as efficient as a real storage protocol like SATA.
 
Would these work in a NAS?
Or because you need an adapter would it just not power up
I've got a Synology Nas (released in 2017) and they work in it. I believe they'll work in any recent NAS, but you can buy one of these, follow the tutorial for shucking it (so you don't damage the enclosure). If it doesn't work return it (or follow some of the ways to work around the issue).
 
You can find a list of different enclosure folks have tested (non-ongoing list though) here on reddit.

Nice unit :)
Thanks :) it was the perfect mix of slow and fast bays. 4x 500gb 860 evo + 2x m.2 500gb 860 evo in raid 6 for my esxi VMs, then 12x 8tb (of these shucked whites) in raid 6.

I’d probably do my own zfs or unraid array if I could do it again. Its not a super fast unit, but for the cost its pretty solid for a 16bay+2 storage w/ 10g SFP+, my R420 servers handle the compute in combo with it well.

I may pick up a R720xd or R820 to play with if my work EOLs them.
 
has anyone grabbed one of these recently and confirmed it to be a WD Red / Gold / HGST identical type w/ Helium? I wonder if the internal drivee style has changed over time or not. Likewise if anyone is buying the 10s and wants to sell a used 8TB with those specs, feel free to PM me !
 
I bought a couple Western Digital Element 10GB external drives from Newegg last week for $160 each.

They both were this drive.
 

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I bought a couple Western Digital Element 10GB external drives from Newegg last week for $160 each.

They both were this drive.

Thanks - that's good to know about the 10TB's. Could you pop open CrystalDiskInfo nex time you had one of them connected and see if of them are Helium models? I believe there's a particular setting (perhaps its entry 22?) that will be positive if the drive uses Helium. Thanks!
 
Thanks - that's good to know about the 10TB's. Could you pop open CrystalDiskInfo nex time you had one of them connected and see if of them are Helium models? I believe there's a particular setting (perhaps its entry 22?) that will be positive if the drive uses Helium. Thanks!
They are both already in my NAS, and in a RAID array with data. Sorry.

Says they are helium here

Mine are both model WD100EMAZ

https://www.servethehome.com/wd-wd100emaz-easystore-10tb-external-backup-drive-review/
 
8TB deal is dead this morning. Seems they run the 'sale' every so often and then shut it down just as quick. On Friday they had the 10TB drives for $159 pre ordered to pick up this Thursday. I ordered two. have to wait till Thursday to find out what's in them at present. I made Bestbuy one of my startup pages so I check the price every day after midnight.
 
8TB deal is dead this morning. Seems they run the 'sale' every so often and then shut it down just as quick. On Friday they had the 10TB drives for $159 pre ordered to pick up this Thursday. I ordered two. have to wait till Thursday to find out what's in them at present. I made Bestbuy one of my startup pages so I check the price every day after midnight.
For ongoing you can setup slick deals to email or text you as well.
 
Got my 10TB EasyStore and it's so much better than the Seagate 6TB shingle drive I shucked. The Shingle drive gets dog slow. This 10TB EasyStore maintained 150-180MB/s write for an entire 3.5TB of writes. The Seagate comes to a crawl after about 300GB of sustained writes.
 
Sorry for not adding the link. And yes, it was the Elements and not the Easystore series...I missed that as well.

However, it was shucked and installed without any issues (so apparently doesn't have the 3.3v issue). The basic model info on the drive would indicate that it's a Red based on the shucking video that I was watching. But if anyone knows of a way to verify one way or the other, I can check it out and report back.
 
Sorry for not adding the link. And yes, it was the Elements and not the Easystore series...I missed that as well.

However, it was shucked and installed without any issues (so apparently doesn't have the 3.3v issue). The basic model info on the drive would indicate that it's a Red based on the shucking video that I was watching. But if anyone knows of a way to verify one way or the other, I can check it out and report back.
Use crystal disk info and it'll tell you the model of the drive, you can determine from that.
 
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