Western Digital 4TB My Book Essential USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive, $179 w/FS at B&H Photo Video online

[g725s 18]

Western Digital 4TB My Book Essential USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive, $179 with Free Shipping at B&H Photo Video online.

 

And No Tax for some.

 

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/890490-REG/Western_Digital_wdbacw0040hbk_nesn_4TB_My_Book_Essential.html

 

The lowest I've seen this drive has been $199, so this is $20 less.

 

[Drashna Jaelre 157]

For me, Costco has had the 4TB Seagate Backup Plus for that price for a while...

[g725s 18]

I'll keep an eye out for that. For me this is no tax though. Would like to see these go lower still.

[g725s 18]

H

For me, Costco has had the 4TB Seagate Backup Plus for that price for a while...

 

Ok it's been a month at least since I've been in Costco. My Costco did have them in stock now for $179 also. But what drive is inside that enclosure?

[ikon 438]

H

 

 

Ok it's been a month at least since I've been in Costco. My Costco did have them in stock now for $179 also. But what drive is inside that enclosure?

 

That is always the question with these external drives. My experience, based mainly on stories from friends and colleages is that there seems to be quite a bit higher failure rate of external drives vs normal internal ones. I have often wondered if manufacturers use drives that pass QC with the lowest scores in their external enclosures.

[Drashna Jaelre 157]

Well, I know the 3TB model is a ST3000DM01. I've gotten like 5 of them. Running strong.

 

@g725s: Yeah, I think they released them too soon, or they got recalled, or such.

[Drashna Jaelre 157]

That is always the question with these external drives. My experience, based mainly on stories from friends and colleages is that there seems to be quite a bit higher failure rate of external drives vs normal internal ones. I have often wondered if manufacturers use drives that pass QC with the lowest scores in their external enclosures.

Something that just popped into my mind. I've had a few bad experiences with externals (exclusively WD externals), and I've seen a lot of reports of issues with them too. However, on every "dead external" I've ever dealt with, as soon as you take it appart and pop the disk into a system, the drive works just fine.

[ImTheTypeOfGuy 54]

That is strange. I would have never thought the enclosure would fail before the drive. Especially for the WD's because I figure they are just crappy green drives. I have never bought an external other than a 2TB Seagate a few years ago.

[ikon 438]

Something that just popped into my mind. I've had a few bad experiences with externals (exclusively WD externals), and I've seen a lot of reports of issues with them too. However, on every "dead external" I've ever dealt with, as soon as you take it appart and pop the disk into a system, the drive works just fine.

That may explain a lot for the WD externals. I've had bad experiences with about a dozen Seagate externals (they were very hard to take apart, actually). When we finally got them open, and ran SpinRite on them, many of them had bunches of recovered sectors.

[Drashna Jaelre 157]

I've only recently bought externals... mainly because I tend not to trust externals. Too many "moving parts" to fail.

 

But just to rub it in, my WD Scorpio Blue (in my hp touchsmart tm2 tablet PC) has been dying for a while. No SMART errors IIRC, but occassional bad sectors... and had to constantly run scanpst because it was corrupting my outlook PST database/file almost daily. Manufacturer tools found errors only when doing the long test, and errored out when trying to fix them. The built in drive tester (in BIOS) hung on the long test. First HDD i've had die on me in a *long* while. And naturally, it's a WD drive.

I got a nice OCZ Vertex 4 (128GB) that replaced it. $84 after tax+shipping.

Edited January 5, 2013 by Drashna (WGS)