mccFeb 28

Are Western Digital drives trustworthy these days. If I want to buy a pretty big non-flash hard drive for "backup and throw in a drawer" purposes, is this a good choice

https://www.amazon.ca/Elements-Portable-External-Drive-WDBU6Y0050BBK-WESN/dp/B07X41PWTY

Amazon.ca

Show threadHugo Mills

@mcc IIRC, WD have good hardware, but the firmwares can be dodgy. (There's a couple of specific versions that are known very bad).

Seagate have decent firmware, but the hardware has a tendency to go phut.

Not sure what the drawbacks of Hitachi are.

I tend to go for Hitachi or WD.

[Edit: This is for HDDs.]

Feb 28 at 6:47pmWeb
Show threadmccFeb 28
@darkling if i am looking at a specific WD drive, is there a way of finding out if it's one with a dodgy firmware?
Show threadHugo MillsFeb 28

@mcc You can get the firmware number out of the SMART info. I don't think there's a published list of known bad drives (for reasons of avoiding lawsuits), but I can ask someone I know on the btrfs IRC channel who keeps such a list for work purposes.

Model number and firmware version, if you have hands on the specific device.

Show threadshironekoFeb 28
@mcc @darkling
Durability wise any of the big brands are fine. However the intended use case for different SKUs is gonna matter quite a bit for getting reliablily/performance.

These external drives are tricky because they don't specify what actual hard drive is in there. Sometimes they put some decent drives in there for a lower price than internal and people would shuck them, but it's the exception not the rule.

IMO if you just want cheap mass storage and don't care about the performance (the use case these drives are targeting (say it's to store media/backup)) then just look at GB/$ and pick the cheapest. Otherwise, buy a known quality internal drive and put it in an enclosure.