External HDD Buying Advice (4/5/6 TB)

Yes those are different/earlier models which did have encryption. I can confirm both my mybooks do NOT have encryption yet cant be seen on sata if formatted on usb and vice versa. It's because the translation chip does the translation only if the drive is in a format which it thinks requires translation. Otherwise (512) it just acts as a standard usb-sata bridge. It's really confusing and i had to read through tons of crap on reddit for a few days before i pieced everything together. Most people (myself included) thought it was encryption that was keeping usb from being read on sata and vice versa. dr100 kept saying that it's not and could be read directly and i thought he was just full of shit. But he was right, only there's a specific format so that the winbond chip will pass through without translation.

If you're open to shucking the drive as soon as you get it (after reliability testing of course) and not concerned about the warranty, you can check if it works directly before copying data to it. In fact i got the second drive primarily to move my almost full first 8tb's contents to it so that i could reformat it to work on both interfaces. The default format that it was in would be readable only on usb but sata would show a gpt protected partition. After the 512 format it's accessible both on usb and sata, but not before. I can't really explain this any better, you can try it out for yourself and see.

Btw, that thomas kaeding guy has done some amazing work decrypting an actually encrypted drive through software in linux. I went through all his stuff at first because i thought my drive was encrypted too. It's quite a slow process but people were able to get all their data without reformatting. But it's not the same issue even though it appears so. Just go through everything that dr100 guy on reddit has said about it, he's 100% correct.

This person's mentioned something similar: https://forums.tomshardware.com/thr...ve-hardware-encryption.3319578/#post-20274537

In fact on thomas' site, he's mentioned mybook live drives not having encryption, yet needing additional steps because of a similar translation issue.

Also, https://github.com/themaddoctor/linux-mybook-tools/issues/9
 
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I have 3 Seagate expansion plus 4 tb and 1 Seagate backup plus 4 tb drives .
Both are the shingled type platter drives .
Very slow read and writes .
Bought them because they were cheap .
Out of four , two have developed bad sectors.
I have shucked all four .
I do not recommend these at all in case you are tempted by its cheap prices .
Cheers !
Ankush .
 
ankushv said:
I have 3 Seagate expansion plus 4 tb and 1 Seagate backup plus 4 tb drives .
Both are the shingled type platter drives .
Very slow read and writes .
Bought them because they were cheap .
Out of four , two have developed bad sectors.
I have shucked all four .
I do not recommend these at all in case you are tempted by its cheap prices .
Cheers !
Ankush .
Click to expand...
Do you think that at lower capacities (<8tb) wd drives may be a better option?

Honestly i would personally only go for the 16tb because it's an exos, and even that no idea about longevity. But because it's a pretty high end enterprise drive, giving it the benefit of the doubt. Even the ironwolf/pro seems to have too many (anecdotal) random failure reports.

Heck even the wd 8tbs i got, the old hgst helium one is awesome, but the new air (white label red probably) is total crap. Barely usable with forced cooling in a PC case, can't even imagine the heat un-shucked.
 
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Hijacking thread to ask same question as OP but my requirement is minimum 4TB HDD. Preferred portable. But I know max at okiesh price is available only upto 4TB.
Is this good enough and is the price ok ? I know this same drive with bank and website offer, it was available for 6.9K but the offer is no longer available.
 
I have noticed that formatting in ext4 gives better life to hdd. Cos i have attached a 1tb seagate on my router and it is on 24x7, it is formatted in ext4 file system. I think its running 2 years or so now.
Any one else can comment on this ?
 
chetansha said:
I have noticed that formatting in ext4 gives better life to hdd. Cos i have attached a 1tb seagate on my router and it is on 24x7, it is formatted in ext4 file system. I think its running 2 years or so now.
Any one else can comment on this ?
Click to expand...
Afraid this might be anecdotal. In several years of using ext4-formatted drives almost exclusively, I've had some of them fail quickly, just as with drives formatted with any other filesystem. Spinning storage involves way too many parameters, and it'll probably require a far larger sample set to say anything certain (or even come close).
 
raksrules said:
Hijacking thread to ask same question as OP but my requirement is minimum 4TB HDD. Preferred portable. But I know max at okiesh price is available only upto 4TB.
Is this good enough and is the price ok ? I know this same drive with bank and website offer, it was available for 6.9K but the offer is no longer available.
Click to expand...

A 5TB is under 900 bucks more. Price is decent. Will always fluctuate a couple of 100 rupees up and down.
 
codelad said:
Afraid this might be anecdotal. In several years of using ext4-formatted drives almost exclusively, I've had some of them fail quickly, just as with drives formatted with any other filesystem. Spinning storage involves way too many parameters, and it'll probably require a far larger sample set to say anything certain (or even come close).
Click to expand...

How do drives fail? Is it more gradual or it’s very sudden? As in can you get to know that you drive is about to fail as it shows some time and you can backup the data or is it more like one morning it simply does not work?
 
@raksrules

I haven't purchased it yet as got caught up with something else. I personally prefer WD but this time I'm thinking of going with Seagate (can be shucked, please correct me if I'm wrong).

The WD 4TB one which you linked cannot be shucked.
 
i_rock098 said:
How do drives fail? Is it more gradual or it’s very sudden? As in can you get to know that you drive is about to fail as it shows some time and you can backup the data or is it more like one morning it simply does not work?
Click to expand...
To an extent, if you are diligent enough, you can predict impending drive failures with programs such as smartmontools. But some drives do fail abruptly and without warning - I have had a working drive that just suddenly started making clicky sounds and was gone the next moment. As you have probably heard numerous times before, *always* keep backups if you value your data.
 
john1911 said:
@raksrules

I haven't purchased it yet as got caught up with something else. I personally prefer WD but this time I'm thinking of going with Seagate (can be shucked, please correct me if I'm wrong).

The WD 4TB one which you linked cannot be shucked.
Click to expand...

I didn't even know what shucking meant until I saw that word for first time in this thread. I am preferring usb powered drive and I don't care about shucking as I don't intend to do that.
 
raksrules said:
Someone here had mentioned that one should not go for these odd number Drives (5TB in this case).
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Oh. Any particular reason behind that?


raksrules said:
I didn't even know what shucking meant until I saw that word for first time in this thread. I am preferring usb powered drive and I don't care about shucking as I don't intend to do that.
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I'm also now looking for USB powered 2.5" drive.

WD one doesn't have SATA ports on the inside so if something gets wrong with the USB PCB, like a microUSB port failure or something else, then the drive is gone. In the Seagate one, you can remove the drive and insides will have SATA data and power ports but I'm not sure if that will be readable or not.
 
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Well, for those thinking about buying WD external drives. LINK
This CVE was known since 2019 and wd just sat on it.
Shuck it and use the drive.
 
JMP said:
Well, for those thinking about buying WD external drives. LINK
This CVE was known since 2019 and wd just sat on it.
Shuck it and use the drive.
Click to expand...

I hope you read the article before posting it. It clearly mentions

"The incident is under active investigation from Western Digital. We do not have any indications of a breach or compromise of Western Digital cloud services or systems.

We have determined that some My Book Live devices have been compromised by a threat actor. In some cases, this compromise has led to a factory reset that appears to erase all data on the device. The My Book Live device received its final firmware update in 2015.

At this time, we are recommending that customers disconnect their My Book Live devices from the Internet to protect their data on the device."
 
dafreaking said:
I hope you read the article before posting it. It clearly mentions
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Yup, I did. Most of us use drives for as long as they function, unlike the enterprise use case where they are thrown upon warranty expiry.

This is not the first time vulnerabilities have been found in external dive software. Many come with internet connectivity options these days. So, was just suggesting it would be safer to use the drive by shucking them, rather than the unit as a whole, after warranty period.
 
JMP said:
Yup, I did. Most of us use drives for as long as they function, unlike the enterprise use case where they are thrown upon warranty expiry.

This is not the first time vulnerabilities have been found in external dive software. Many come with internet connectivity options these days. So, was just suggesting it would be safer to use the drive by shucking them, rather than the unit as a whole, after warranty period.
Click to expand...

Just format the drive when you get it. There's no need to run WD or Seagates software. Also most drives can't be used after shucking without formatting them (learnt this the hard way with WD). I didn't try this in reverse. (shuck and then re-attach the sata->usb controller)
 
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