8TB WD Easystore External USB 3.0 Hard Drive Expired

A few words to the wise to anyone who isn't planning on shucking these and just wants to use them as external drives:

They run incredibly hot in the enclosure. As in, almost dangerously hot. They can easily hit 50C during heavy read/write even if ambient temperature is room temperature. The enclosure itself has little to no ventilation. It was amusing to see the drive run cooler when I put it on top of the (hot) upper exhaust fan that was venting a 65C CPU and 70C GPU under load - some air moving through the enclosure was better than none.
The default behavior of the drives is to spin down after they've been idle for a certain amount of time, I think 30 minutes. On one of my computers, this causes an issue with the admittedly spotty Sandy Bridge era USB3 controller, or the hub in my monitor - I can still see the drive in Explorer, but trying to "wake" it by accessing it just results in either an I/O error or the drive disappearing. I have to unplug/replug the USB cable, or the power adapter, then it spins back up.
That behavior can be modified (never spin down) using one of WD's utilities for external drives, I want to say it's called "WD Discovery" but don't quote me on that. Hard drives arguably last longer the less times you have to spin them up or down. There is no consensus on whether or not running them too hot shortens their life span. They're helium drives, so they don't use much power.
I didn't have the above issue with a different USB3 controller.

Other tidbits from someone who's shucked almost a dozen of these:

This is by far the most difficult WD enclosure to open, along with the older My Book that it shares a mold with. The Elements enclosure has clips that are easier to undo without destroying. I used to very carefully open these, now I just use a metal letter opener and literally shuck them like oysters. The clips are going to break either way.
If you get the WD80EMAZ drive, it plays nice with RAID controllers - both "fake" RAID like Intel RST and RSTe, and even hardware RAID controllers like an LSI card. They're also obviously comfortable with newer software RAID setups like unRAID or FreeNAS or Proxmox or whatever.
They (claim to) support TLER. Haven't noticed anything to indicate otherwise.
They come off the same assembly line as WD UltraStar DC HC510 drives, aka HGST UltraStar He10 drives. The firmware is different, they don't spin at 7200 RPM, and they obviously don't have a 5 year warranty like the enterprise drives. They also cost half as much.
Adding to that, there's some inconsistency with these drives. I tried 4 different ones, solo, in an enclosure with a fan. There's a ~7 degree temperature delta between the 4 disks, both at idle and at load. That might be why they "became" an easyStore instead of a Red, Purple, He10, etc. I've yet to have one die on me. Performance is indistinguishable from the other 5400RPM drives that share the design, the Helium filled Red and Purple drives.
The enclosure itself will play nice with damn near any disk if you try to repurpose it. I threw an ancient 1.5TB Hitachi in one for a friend and it works fine. Runs toasty as mentioned above, but if 70k hours of beating on that disk didn't kill it, this won't.


Always back your shit up, and remember, if a drive is going to die, it usually dies when its new!

Also available on eBay for those who have 8% eBay Bucks.

https://rover.ebay.com/rover/0/0/...2784859465

You'll get mixed responses. Some think Seagate is OK. Other's think they're the devil.

One that looks like the one you mentioned was on sale at Costco a while back. Some SDers bought them. Some kept them. Many returned them and bought WD. At least one died within a week and another within a month.

Seagate was infamous for selling HDDs with known failure and death problems. They lied about it for years and refused to refund customers. Internal docs revealed their malfeasance.

Regardless of that, independent studies show Seagate to rate the lowest annually.

Most people I know in tech and engineering fields wont buy Seagate.

I've had WD, HGST and Hitachi fail but they were all very old.
I've never owned a Seagate.

That's just the 411 as I know it. I hope your lucky with whatever you choose.