USB 14tb WD Easystore $199 Best Buy (and 18tb $280)

[Twice_Shy]

I literally ordered this saturday for pickup today prepaid at $240 and when I showed up in person I noticed on the shelf it was $199. It's also showing up on shucks.top just now - great price for anyone needing a drive.

The 14tb seems to be 7200rpm (smaller ones may be 5400rpm) and seems to be CMR conventional (not shingled) for NAS use. Some people talk of some 3.3 volt 'issue' for NAS use if shucked. This is a USB external.

The 18tb shows as $280. I THINK these are CMR conventional because WD came out with some larger conventional sizes (the 20tb is shingled for sure) but price per TB is less good than the 14.

 

[Bert]

you can also get another 15% off by recycling old hard drive. This is the standard price for these drives, I bought several of them from the same price last year. For some reason, they are not lowering it more, probably next year as 18Tb becomes ubiquitous

 

[ocfguy]

The 20TB Easystore/Element is not shingled.
The R/N on these drives is US7SAS200, which corresponds to the R/N of HC560, which is a CMR drive. This is not to say that the external drives are equivalent to the Ultrastar drives, as they might be lower binned and are definitely firmware limited in terms of speed.

For comparison, WD’s 20TB SMR drive (HC650) has a R/N of US7SSR200.

I literally ordered this saturday for pickup today prepaid at $240 and when I showed up in person I noticed on the shelf it was $199. It's also showing up on shucks.top just now - great price for anyone needing a drive.

The 14tb seems to be 7200rpm (smaller ones may be 5400rpm) and seems to be CMR conventional (not shingled) for NAS use. Some people talk of some 3.3 volt 'issue' for NAS use if shucked. This is a USB external.

The 18tb shows as $280. I THINK these are CMR conventional because WD came out with some larger conventional sizes (the 20tb is shingled for sure) but price per TB is less good than the 14.

 

[EasyRhino]

i bought one of these last year, for 14tb it was the black friday price. now it's a regular sale price so that's progress I guess?

you know just to use this deal as an opportunity to rant.... personally i've kind of soured on buying external drives, unless I intend to keep them external.

shucking is a pain. 3.3v power is a bigger pain. firmware limited speed reductions on annoying.

for internal drives, I'll just get used drives instead.

 

[Bert]

I am curious what these pain points are I shucked them and used them without any issues, they look pretty speedy on the sequential write/read. Can I learn?

 

[EasyRhino]

sequential speed on a fresh drive for an external drive might be... what, like 200MB/s. while if it was a 7200rpm drive it might be like 250MB/s.

What did you do with your drive that avoided any 3.3v pin power problems?

 

[ocfguy]

sequential speed on a fresh drive for an external drive might be... what, like 200MB/s. while if it was a 7200rpm drive it might be like 250MB/s.

What did you do with your drive that avoided any 3.3v pin power problems?

interestingly I did not experience 3.3V issues with a shucked 16TB drive, however I did run into the issue with a retail SAS Ultrastar HC550.

I taped the 3rd pin on the power connector and it spun up.

 

[ocfguy]

sequential speed on a fresh drive for an external drive might be... what, like 200MB/s. while if it was a 7200rpm drive it might be like 250MB/s.

What did you do with your drive that avoided any 3.3v pin power problems?

Interestingly it is a 7200rpm drive, and if you run a short SMART test you’ll be having higher speeds while the test is running

 

[EasyRhino]

so you mean you get a slow speed when a smart test is not running, and a faster speed when it is running?

 

[ocfguy]

so you mean you get a slow speed when a smart test is not running, and a faster speed when it is running?

Yes, if you run a short smart test (at least on my firmware, but I doubt they have changed it), you’ll be getting 7200rpm speeds. The smart test won’t complete until I/O activity stops.

 

[Bert]

sequential speed on a fresh drive for an external drive might be... what, like 200MB/s. while if it was a 7200rpm drive it might be like 250MB/s.

What did you do with your drive that avoided any 3.3v pin power problems?

I put them into disk shelves. I don't know what 3.3v power problem is. Do these drives draw more power on 3.3v line?

For sequential read/write speeds, I didn't notice any major slowness. I can test them tomorrow and report back on the actual values.

 

[EasyRhino]

I put them into disk shelves. I don't know what 3.3v power problem is. Do these drives draw more power on 3.3v line?

Some drives, which typically includes external hard drives, and some 12gb SAS drives, use the 3.3v SATA power pin as an indication to power off or reset or something. Which means if you have a generic consumer ATX power supply, it's going to always supply power on the 3.3v pin and the drive wont' work. so people need to tape over the pin on the HDD, or cut the 3.3v wire (hopefully on an extension cable) etc.

but if you're using an enterprise backplane or disk shelf or something, then it either handles the 3.3v issue natively or doesn't supply 3.3v power at all, so no problem.