8TB WD easystore USB 3.0 External Hard Drive Expired

My disjointed thoughts on the HDD market:
* The typical BB customer doesn't have anywhere close to 8TB of stuff to store; people are still buying 16 and 32GB iPhones--the market has moved towards the cloud, and manufacturers are picking up on this fact. They use warranty length as a primary means of price-discrimination, and another trend is the use of unshuckable drives to control how their drives can be used.

* HDD prices have been sky-high for the last two years, especially on the high-capacity/high-performance side of the market.

* HDD manufacturers have been trying to sell these drives at close to MSRP, but they're finding it hard to sell an 8TB Red for $270 when many in the consumer NAS market remember the days of $150 for a 6TB red.

* I paid $150 for a white-label 6TB (rebadged 5700RPM Red) back in Q1 2016; prices shot up quickly after that due to production issues.

* The announcement of 8TB He drives didn't lower prices much as because they were released in the middle of the shortage (as an aside, remember the external WD drives with Hitachi He8 drives inside them?)

* Even 2.5in HDDs have suffered from stagnant prices and capacity--I bought a 2TB portable HDD for ~$75 back in Q4 2014. Prices are about the same right now, and 4TB drives are too thick to be used in laptops/consoles internally.

Basically, my thoughts are: consumers have been holding out against high HDD prices, WD decides to release a BB-exclusive drive in huge volumes as a way of moving all the extra inventory.

Yeah Crystal Disk Info to check status of the disk.
WD Data LifeGuard to do a full write (erase) to the disk.
Windows to do a full format
WD Data LifeGuard to do a long self test
Re-Verify data in Crystal Disk Info to make sure during all that nothing went bad.

Check the bottom box when you get the drive - if the model # is LGBJRCK, thats the 128MB cache version, there's a newer 256MB cache version with model #MGBJRCK