WD Easystore 14TB External USB 3.0 Hard Drive - $200

[next-Jin]

Picked up 2 for 367.88 using quad pay or whatever it was off Newegg. Was like 170 each putting it at $12.14 per TB. Going to use it in my unRaid server as the new parity drives then build using 14TB drives from here on out. Using 8TB currently all of which were EasyStores.

 

[Erebus]

Update: One of my 14tb drives purchased early November started experiencing bad sector issues around 400 hours of use in. Badblocks now fails on the first phase of testing, after this particular drive made it through an entire round of testing with Badblocks when new. My other four appear to be holding up (~800 hours of use on them).

 

[CVNet1]

Update: One of my 14tb drives purchased early November started experiencing bad sector issues around 400 hours of use in. Badblocks now fails on the first phase of testing, after this particular drive made it through an entire round of testing with Badblocks when new. My other four appear to be holding up (~800 hours of use on them).

I was in for one 14tb drive in early December. It passed all tests (wld-diag long test)and nothing concerning in SMART data, but it is generally really noisy in my opinion and I continue to wonder if it indicates an issue. Often times the noise reminds me of the heads retracting back to clean the heads and then seeking again. This was happening on read or write and initially at idle too, but after a few days it occurred less frequently and only during read/write.

Only thing I came up with is that the stored data on the drive had increased from 0 to 5TB after those first few days.

Anyone else experience this with these 14tb helium drives from WD?

 

[SamirD]

I was in for one 14tb drive in early December. It passed all tests (wld-diag long test)and nothing concerning in SMART data, but it is generally really noisy in my opinion and I continue to wonder if it indicates an issue. Often times the noise reminds me of the heads retracting back to clean the heads and then seeking again. This was happening on read or write and initially at idle too, but after a few days it occurred less frequently and only during read/write.

Only thing I came up with is that the stored data on the drive had increased from 0 to 5TB after those first few days.

Anyone else experience this with these 14tb helium drives from WD?

These drives are based on the proven HGST enterprise design which has changed little in the last decade because it's so solid. However, it has always been a 'noisy' design when compared to consumer desktop drives. Quiet, Reliable, Cheap--pick two.

 

[CVNet1]

These drives are based on the proven HGST enterprise design which has changed little in the last decade because it's so solid. However, it has always been a 'noisy' design when compared to consumer desktop drives. Quiet, Reliable, Cheap--pick two.

I'm good with that.

My previous experience with consumer based drives (since after the Maxtor Fireball series) had always been that noisy drives generally have a physical issue somewhere occurring. For instance I had an ancient 40gb WD white label drive that was always noisy similar to what I described above which made me distrust it for anything more than a temporary backup drive for transferring data off damaged OS installs so I could put it back after reformat/ install.

Eventually the drive threw some SMART errors and not long after, it crashed a head into the platters and when I opened it up, I found all the data on it was neatly coating the outside casing at the bottom of the drive; slightly more jumbled into an unrecoverable mess.

Thanks for the reassurance. Going forward I'll just remind myself that these drives are just noisy by design.

 

[SamirD]

I'm good with that.

My previous experience with consumer based drives (since after the Maxtor Fireball series) had always been that noisy drives generally have a physical issue somewhere occurring. For instance I had an ancient 40gb WD white label drive that was always noisy similar to what I described above which made me distrust it for anything more than a temporary backup drive for transferring data off damaged OS installs so I could put it back after reformat/ install.

Eventually the drive threw some SMART errors and not long after, it crashed a head into the platters and when I opened it up, I found all the data on it was neatly coating the outside casing at the bottom of the drive; slightly more jumbled into an unrecoverable mess.

Thanks for the reassurance. Going forward I'll just remind myself that these drives are just noisy by design.

Yeah, noise in a consumer drive is definitely something that concerns me unless it's an enterprise design that is put into a consumer model (like the easystore), and I actually prefer enterprise models over 'quiet' because I'd rather have the performance so if it's quiet it actually bothers me.

 

[Ikasu]

Can definitely vouch for the HGST manufactured drives. I have 11 HGST manufactured drives. Some with over 50,000 hours on them. Still going strong. Smallest being 3 and 4tb Deskstar NAS drives, I remember when I first set them up, they being louder than my other WD drives, but they have served extremely well, and still do so. Got some Coolspin, Deskstar Nas, and Helium WD labeled HGST drives, I swear by their manufacturing process. As long as I know it's manufactured in the HGST based facilities, I'll steer that way every time. Where as my seagate barracuda pro, which I only purchased cause I got a smoking deal BNIB from my local Fry's at the time, already gave me smart errors 10 months into owning it. I try to stay away from seagate as much as possible, but the price got the better of me on that one.

 

[SamirD]

Can definitely vouch for the HGST manufactured drives. I have 11 HGST manufactured drives. Some with over 50,000 hours on them. Still going strong. Smallest being 3 and 4tb Deskstar NAS drives, I remember when I first set them up, they being louder than my other WD drives, but they have served extremely well, and still do so. Got some Coolspin, Deskstar Nas, and Helium WD labeled HGST drives, I swear by their manufacturing process. As long as I know it's manufactured in the HGST based facilities, I'll steer that way every time. Where as my seagate barracuda pro, which I only purchased cause I got a smoking deal BNIB from my local Fry's at the time, already gave me smart errors 10 months into owning it. I try to stay away from seagate as much as possible, but the price got the better of me on that one.

Seagate got a bad rep when they had to try to compete with consumer lines and had to compromise on their top tier products for the better part of a decade. But prior to that they were the top dog that no one could touch. I still have 2x 2nd generation scsi 8gb Cheetah drives that were blazing fast for their time. And I believe they have finally returned to top form. I have 6x of their 16TB Exos drives that run almost in parallel with my HGST enterprise drives and they have also been a solid product that have a nice solid sound coming from them. I think the Exos product gives the HGST products a run for the money.