Data Hoarder

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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.

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Buy large capacity off the shelf backup drive or assemble one myself? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm going to be setting up my first NAS soon and want to be sure that I have a backup solution in place as well. I'd like to store all of my files locally rather than using a cloud service for backups. I could either buy a premade backup drive (WD Elements, Seagate Expansion, etc.) or a large hard disk and an enclosure and assemble one myself. Can those of you with experience in this area please guide me? I'd appreciate learning about the pros and cons from expert data hoarders :) Thank you!

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I would just buy off the shelf

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Whats your plan on building a NAS?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

-Cut and paste-

I wouldn't buy externals anymore. Better to spend a little more and get a guaranteed 1st tier internal drive from someone like ServerPartDeals.

Q: Is it true that the drives in externals can be: overstock, overruns, binned (out of spec drives), from cancelled orders.

A: Yes to all of it. Externals are the lowest bins above the [redated] (Edit: binned rives} we sell to third parties. It’s whatever is leftover. They have less warranty because they aren’t expected to last as long.

My notes: The first part is supported by what I posted in this thread, https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/11jmot5/to_those_asking_what_drive_is_inside_my_wd/ which has a link to WD's disclosure about this.

It's been confirmed by another source that the binned drives, are drives that are Out Of Spec, flashed with special firmware that can't be updated and is no longer supported by the manufacturer. This is source of SOME of the unbranded drives from certain resellers.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/146hb9k/information_about_cmr_to_smr_manufacturer/

To those asking "What drive is inside my WD external?". From WD...

Drive Type Inside of a WD External Drive Enclosure

The drive inside of a Western Digital enclosure may vary depending on application.

Depending on model, the internal drive included an external enclosure could have a SATA or native USB interface.

We can only guarantee drive capacity.

We cannot guarantee a particular internal drive model, data interface, rotational speed, power consumption, transfer speed or cache size included in the external hard drive enclosure.

We can only guarantee a Western Digital Drive.

We cannot guarantee a particular enclosure will have a WD colored drive inside.

Dismantling any single-drive external enclosure to obtain this information will void the warranty of the hard drive.

Please refer to the Western Digital Warranty Policy.

Interface and cache of the drives inside the external enclosure does not affect the performance or the data transfer rate of the external drive unit.

https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detailweb/a_id/13652

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I don't think it matters that much. It's more important to have several backup copies and follow the 3-2-1 rule: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/. For backups, I would just go with a cheaper option.