I am debating between those Western Digital portable drives that go up to 5tb that function with USB only (WD my passport) and the bigger ones (eg my book) that are bigger and need power outlet besides the USB connection.
Is there any difference in quality or durability to store media?
I would avoid an external or at least ensure the hdd inside it pinned to a normal conector.
I certainly lost data on one going bad and had no easy way of extracting data off of it due to having some soldered proprietary connection.
Not really. Any drive used for external USB is probably binned for that, meaning it may not have passed enough quality checks for higher-durability internal use.
I havent seen inside a MyPassport but the MyBook is just a standard 3.5" SATA drive with a USB controller attached. For the smaller form factor, I’d imagine they’re more integrated and not able to be shucked which means it could, in theory, be less reliable if the control board broke, but this is just speculation and the odds of that happening are probably pretty low.
That makes sense. And do you know between Mybook and Elements what is the primary difference? Besides the looks of the outer casing.
There may have been a difference at one point before WD realized what people were commonly using these for, but I was previously using 5 shucked Elements and one MyBook (all 8TB) bought between 2018 and 2024 and they were all the same white label drives.
Piggybacking to ask if anyone knows of any external HDD that is SATA internally so I can take it apart and shove it into my system. The price difference is insane right now
This is called drive schucking, if you search for that you should be able to find some lists
Thank you!
Thank you! I didn’t know that was a thing, but since I’m in the market to begin building a NAS, that will surely be useful to know terminology
If it’s for a NAS try to make sure it’s CMR (conventional) and not a shingled drive (SMR). Shingled will be slower and noisier and SMART tests will take days to run as it gets near full.
ETA: Western Digital - Seagate
And thank you for that, too. I had no idea there would be so much to consider, but I’m glad to be informed.
Good question. I would imagine the internal ones would be cheaper, but its the contrary. Crazy
I don’t think the durability of data is affected in your examples. All of my external USB disks are kinda old but they run on type-B; the ones with additional power will probably have a faster spin. If running on USB type-C then that may not be an issue either.
