We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
I have about a dozen dead wd white labels, all clicked/faulted right around the 3-5 year mark. (Out of 41 disks across 3 servers).
Looking back, the small discount from shucking was not worth it in long run. These are subpar drives.
Just my personal two cents.
2/8 for me at about the 5 year mark.
I have three that don’t even power around anymore for no reason when I can’t figure out why
If you bought those all at once, sounds like a bad manufacturing batch.
Yeah before shucking got popular the white labels were helium filled and the 14tb and 10tb drives required the 3 pin tape mod on all my evga and Corsair psus. I won’t be buying wd to shuck again. I’ve had good luck with seagate expansion drives which are actually labeled exos or ironwolfs which are supported with firmware updates from seagate. Warranty claims also isn’t an issue I worry about with seagate.
I’m coming up to the 4 year mark on my wd white labels and they’re a hassle.
I have 8 WD whitelabels that are all around 5 years old. None dead yet but I may have just gotten lucky so far. I'm going to buy 2 of these to start replacing the old ones.
Honestly at this point I'm buying used drives. I have redundancy anyway, and if I get a 50% discount for buying used and have to buy 10% more drives for extra redundancy, that still comes up Milhouse.
So for someone who currently relies on external drives, you wouldn't recommend this? Would that be all WD easystores or just the 18tb? I've still got a ways to go before migrating to internals so I can't really afford much more than the $200 thus far
This is all anecdotal evidence.
I’ve got 8-8TB, 8-12TB, and 3-14TB drives (all white label shucks) bought between 7yrs ago and now. The 8TBs were all bought over 5yrs and no failures. I’ve had 1 -12TB die recently, it was at the 3yr mark.
I have 2x8TB, 2x10TB 2x12TB, 2x18TB and 14TB, all shucked. No issues. the 8TB's are at 6 years powered on too.
I think you have environmental issues at play. That failure rate is incredibly abnormal.
Hoohoo, $400 CAD up in the great white north. a whopping $50 off lol.
We had the 14TB one onsale for $240 last week which wasnt too bad.
That was a Seagate 14tb external, not a WD.
FWIW WD is having a "buy 2 18TB Red Pro drives for $549" sale right now
https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-red-pro-sata-hdd?sku=WD181KFGX
$25 extra for a Red Pro drive & not having shuck seems like a good value to me
$11.11/TB, pretty screaming $/TB right there
That's what I did first too haha 😂 anything below $13 is worth investigation!
Sigh, I just bought the 14tb last weekend. I could return it and buy this though…
Return it?
Anyone know the exact model of drive?
It is somewhat tempting, but I bought six 18tb drives a few years ago. I have already replaced half of them. My nine 8tb drives have been much more reliable.
I'm in Canada. In August, I bought the WD easystore 14TB for $299 (Best Buy). The current "Black Friday" price is $399.
Ugh just bought two 14TB last weekend for the same price…
I returned the 14TB I bought last weekend and bought this one today instead. I'd recommend doing the same!
aw shucks!
18 TB? Amateurs.
Are these ok for colder storage use that may get pulled and check maybe 2x a year?
Thinking about buying 2 and shucking them
yes
that is craaaaazy cheap
what's the noise level gonna be on these?
Just finished using mine. Wasn't very loud in my opinion.
Absolutely don't need it, but I want it.
i stopped shucking with last years 18 tb seagate exos from server parts deals for 194 each but still buy externals for back ups. are the 18 tb wd externals particularly unreliable? i have good luck with wd externals and i have a whole shelf of them. only 1 12 tb died with in 2 years and had to be rmaed. had some 8s and 3tbs die but at the 5 plus year mark and i was phasing them out anyway. i still have 3 tb elements that still worked last that checked
These hard drives look nice but let me save yall the trouble from using this as “backup storage”. Literally dealing with an older version of this external drive had to send out for data recovery. It never dropped nor received water damage. It just seems to have failed which I believe is on the PCB end of the drive, hoping so to recover it fairly easily. If you use it just do proper backup management on a cloud or something. I mean that’s a given a general better practice anyway. But these things seem to fail eventually so don’t rely on it
What a fucking deal!
if I didn't have a 16TB version, I might go for it.
I actually quite regret buying it earlier cause damnnnnn.
About 275 Canadian Pesos for those keeping track. Wish we had the prices you guys south of the border seem to get!
In the past I've given up buying locally and instead bulk ordered drives in the US and shipping to a US address, then package-forwarding them over the border. Saved quite a lot, duties on HDDs aren't that high!
What drive is inside?
Very tempting, but the reliability is concerning me a lot
Should I buy this or wait for a better deal? I was waiting until Black Friday season to get a new hard drive
According to the Best Buy webpage, this IS the Black Friday deal.
Where I live I can't even get a 4TB one for that price
I hate my country
Just ordered 3. Thanks for the posting.
Ah man, I just bought a 8TB WD Elements for $99 and now this comes along!
bought 5, do I need them? no. Do I want them? Damn right.
Better man than me…
so are these drives worth it? I mean the price is nice but is the quality worth it?
I'm interested but don't want something to die out. I suppose my other question is what is normal life expectancy if 4/5 years is considered bad.
Setting up my first NAS (synology). This or recertified Exo for the same price and warranty?
Jealous in European.