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

@mcc with the addendum that sometimes people sell fakes on Amazon (more of a problem with flash media afaik), yeah, I'd trust them

(this is a general problem with storage on Amazon, not with WD in particular)

@ratsnakegames @mcc I suppose the "fake" here would be "a drive that was retired from a datacenter, had its power on hours reset, and has a totally non-suspicious ten billion head un/loading events on it".
@rotopenguin @mcc in the flash/SSD space, the "fake" is usually "a 128MB flash drive with a controller that lies and claims to be 2TB large, then writes your data into nowhere, and also WD definitely didn't make it"
@ratsnakegames love seeing the 8TB Lenovo microSD cards on Aliexpress
@rotopenguin yeah, like, ideally don't buy those

@ratsnakegames there's another version of flash card fraud going around, cards that *do* possess the advertised size. These are included with a lot of emulation systems, I don't know if they have escaped containment into any other market yet.

The thing with them is, the cards come loaded with stuff, you can write to them somewhat, but they die from a wholesale rewrite. I suspect that they are leaving out the erase circuitry, for however much die space/process steps that saves.