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expiredMrsClause posted May 01, 2023 08:27 PM
expiredMrsClause posted May 01, 2023 08:27 PM

8TB Western Digital WD Blue 5640 RPM 3.5" Internal Hard Drive

+ Free Shipping

$100

$150

33% off
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Amazon has 8TB Western Digital WD Blue 5640 RPM 3.5" Internal Hard Drive (WD80EAZZ) on sale for $99.99. Shipping is free.

Newegg has 8TB Western Digital WD Blue 5640 RPM 3.5" Internal Hard Drive (WD80EAZZ) on sale for $99.99. Shipping is free.

Thanks to Staff Member MrsClause and Community Member pholly for finding this deal.

Editor's Notes

Written by Corwin | Staff
  • About this deal:
    • This price is $50 lower (33.3% savings) than the list price of $149.99.
    • Refer to the forum thread for discussion of this deal.
  • About this product:
    • 2-Year Limited Warranty
  • About this store:

Original Post

Written by MrsClause
Community Notes
About the Poster
Deal Details
Community Notes
About the Poster
Amazon has 8TB Western Digital WD Blue 5640 RPM 3.5" Internal Hard Drive (WD80EAZZ) on sale for $99.99. Shipping is free.

Newegg has 8TB Western Digital WD Blue 5640 RPM 3.5" Internal Hard Drive (WD80EAZZ) on sale for $99.99. Shipping is free.

Thanks to Staff Member MrsClause and Community Member pholly for finding this deal.

Editor's Notes

Written by Corwin | Staff
  • About this deal:
    • This price is $50 lower (33.3% savings) than the list price of $149.99.
    • Refer to the forum thread for discussion of this deal.
  • About this product:
    • 2-Year Limited Warranty
  • About this store:

Original Post

Written by MrsClause

Community Voting

Deal Score
+28
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Top Comments

gjsneptune
1398 Posts
336 Reputation
To save people time, this is CMR (the good one).
Andrepartthree
840 Posts
316 Reputation
I can second what Elpee says in that I had a great experience with a Western Digital Red Plus that got shipped to me twice by mistake because amazon kept sending them to me instead of the 1 TB W.D. Black I was trying to order .. had to return the second one but they generously let me kept the first one for free (which I'm guessing is NOT a normal amazon thing to do the amazon rep must have been in a really good mood that day , not that I'm complaining ) .. said drive served me faithfully for two years as a desktop drive of all things for file storage and only pulled it out of my PC to swap it for a bigger capacity drive was still working fine when I pulled it out.

Newegg has the 8 TB for $130 for the Red Plus which is more expensive but does come with a 3 year warranty provided you believe WD will honor it to begin with ( I say this only because I personally have never used their warranty for all I know they honor it just fine wiser heads than mine can probably comment on this .. also edit and update sorry everyone and thanks for pointing this out sr71, I originally said 5 year warranty in my original post, it's a 3 year warranty on the Red Plus models)

https://www.newegg.com/red-plus-w...6822234504

And because I'm paranoid I double checked and also noticed the blue WD drive the OP posted is a CMR drive which are supposed to be better than SMR's though there's a whole raging debate about that on various forums including slickdeals (personally I like to play it safe and stick with CMR)

https://nascompares.com/answer/li...rives-hdd/


(something I forgot to mention in this post originally looks like the WD Red Plus is also CMR)

https://documents.westerndigital....us-hdd.pdf

If the drive fails after two years (Blue) or three years (Red) it's worth checking with your credit card company, they might have automatically extended the warranty by one year .. how many hoops they'll make you jump through and if they'll give you a credit for the purchase price back to your card varies from card to card but absolutely worth keeping an electronic pdf copy of the receipt and taking a picture of the serial number on the drive and keeping that safely backed up...

I've seen a number of people online state that Western Digital makes more reliable hard drives and to stay away from seagate including people who work in the I.T. ("computer guy" at a company) department.. but I've also seen others who say that's anecdotal info who are also professional "computer guys" for a living and they just go with whatever drive gives the best bang for their buck regardless of the manufacturer. One tech expert mentioned they've had good luck.. sort of.. with seagate but if you go the cheaper route.. pay $10 to mail the drive in to seagate.. expect them to hang onto the drive for a LONG while (month or longer) and do everything they can to repair the drive and ship it back rather than just immediately mailing out a refurbished drive to you should you use their warranty. You could also pay more money for them to immediately ship out a replacement drive BUT seagate will charge you the cost for the drive they immediately ship out to you if they determine that the drive you mailed in to them is in fact not defective so not worth the risk to me personally.

So why am I babbling so much about seagate? Well there's this

https://www.newegg.com/seagate-fi...6822185036

So you might look at that and go " wow , 8 TB , 7200 rpm drive with a 5 year warranty for $110? I'll buy that instead." And I did.. but then there's this

https://studio.youtube.com/video/...kqQlM/edit

A noisy hard drive doesn't bother me as far as the noise itself per se (don't care as long as it's the noise it's SUPPOSED to make) but it's driving me nuts trying to figure out if my brand new firecuda drive is defective or if that's just the sound 8 TB and other high capacity hard drives normally make. I've posted on three tech support type forums so far, one flat out said hard drive sounds are hard to diagnose and to just use it until it dies and not to worry if it's behaving itself and so far it is (it's passed various hard drive tests I'll get into below).

Another very friendly and helpful guy on another forum was like " dude I own 35 to 40 hard drives at any one time send that sucker right back it's going to die on you soon they are NOT supposed to make sounds like that."

On a third forum on reddit someone with a fairly good reputation there (on reddit that means a high karma score) seemed to feel the hard drive sound was normal but also mentioned he feels seagate drives are lower quality and fail sooner than other drives.

If you have an external usb 3.0 dock for hard drives you can plug sata drives into (well worth the cost in my opinion and I found even the cheap no name brands work just fine) it's absolutely worth plugging the drive into the dock and connecting it to your PC first to confirm it's not making any funny sounds as I found out the hard way (first firecuda drive made a steady clicking sound and was DOA when I plugged it into the motherboard but this was probably due to the cardboard package being in rough banged up shape and newegg not using enough packaging for their hard drives, a common complaint but amazon's been known to do this too when mailing stuff to me) .

Here's a few hard drive diagnostic tools you can download

https://www.seagate.com/support/d.../seatools/

https://support-en.wd.com/app/ans...a_id/10346

https://hddscan.com/

https://crystalmark.info/en/softw...ldiskinfo/

others on this forum might recommend other hard drive diagnostic tools too but worth running at least the appropriate manufacturer tool (apparently the seagate one works for other non seagate hard drives too) plus hddscan and crystalmark on that new drive. Also helpful

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcGrEcn-tV4

One other thing worth noting... if you have stuff on your drive that can cause serious problems for you if it falls into the wrong hands (no I'm not talking about anything illegal but I'm sure lots of people have files on their PC that can cause say personal or financial or both kinds of ruin ).. well on the one hand I've been told you want to run DBAN

https://dban.org/

before you send that hard drive in under warranty.. or do a full, not quick, format from disk management.. but I've also been told this can take.. no joke.. 48 hours or more for 8 TB drives like this one. (edit and update see the very helpful comments by MWink, he says maybe 13 hours which is different than what I've been told but if you look at his comments he definitely knows his computer hardware )

So you'd have to decide if you feel comfortable letting your PC run for two days in a row (or far less demanding just 13 hours) though I've also been told that a lot of people let their PC's run 24/7, 365 days a year anyways with no harm done to their PC's. Sure you could do say a quick format which takes a lot less time and which I used to think would wipe all your data.. bad news, it doesn't, anyone with right file recovery programs could pull those files from your drive. Tech experts I've spoken to online insist on DBAN before they'll even consider sending a drive in that's under warranty.

Sorry for the usual long wall of text, this is all stuff I wish I'd known before grabbing a 8 TB drive I hope it helps someone else.

If nothing else given how low hard drive prices are and depending on how much space you need for your files you could grab two of these or two 8 TB drives in general from different manufacturers to hedge your bets, put one in an external enclosure and use it for periodic backups of your files and of Windows and keep the other one as the file storage type drive in your PC and also for Windows backups.

https://www.newegg.com/p/1Z4-002P...002P-024F9

final bit of rambling there.. grabbed that one from newegg as well for $120 (seagate exos 7E10 , 8 TB drive 7200 rpm , 5 year warranty) and it's been working great these past few weeks, had a very occasional whining sound that alarmed me at first but I've been told this is just the drive automatically powering itself on and off .. not normally meant for desktop drive use but I've seen reports of happy users using it for just that and it's working out great for them... it definitely doesn't alarm me with it's noises the way the firecuda drive does !
MWink
2330 Posts
3167 Reputation
There's a lot of good info in here. Like many, I've been pretty sour on Seagate for about 15 years now. There's just too much data (statistical, anecdotal, and personal) pointing to them being less reliable than other companies. I recently decided to give them another try, thinking maybe things had changed but it doesn't seem to be the case. One of the Exos drives I recently purchased is obviously struggling. It passes diagnostics but I can sometimes hear that it's having trouble. I regret not sending it back during the return period. Part of me is hoping that it will hurry up and die, so I can get it replaced under warranty.

BTW, I'm not sure DBAN is really necessary anymore. A secure erase or single-pass overwrite should be sufficient, unless maybe you have something super sensitive on there. It will still take a number of hours but not 48 on an 8TB drive. A quick format is definitely inadequate and easy to recover data from, even using free utilities.

Also, some people suggest encrypting the drive. That way, should it unexpectedly completely fail, you can send it in without having to worry about wiping it first.

41 Comments

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May 01, 2023 08:33 PM
1,398 Posts
Joined Mar 2011
gjsneptuneMay 01, 2023 08:33 PM
1,398 Posts

Our community has rated this post as helpful. If you agree, why not thank gjsneptune

To save people time, this is CMR (the good one).
6
May 01, 2023 11:40 PM
165 Posts
Joined Nov 2019
snook4dealsMay 01, 2023 11:40 PM
165 Posts
Can I run this in my NAS?
May 02, 2023 12:51 AM
1,215 Posts
Joined Mar 2006
phollyMay 02, 2023 12:51 AM
1,215 Posts

Our community has rated this post as helpful. If you agree, why not thank pholly

Same price on Amazon if anyone is interested

Western Digital 8TB WD Blue PC Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5640 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, 128 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD80EAZZ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09KMGQ...PA57CXAMHE

Looks like you'll have to manually switch sellers to Amazon
2
1
May 02, 2023 02:55 AM
2,164 Posts
Joined Apr 2005
DealAddictMay 02, 2023 02:55 AM
2,164 Posts
Quote from snook4deals :
Can I run this in my NAS?
Same question here: Would running four reds with one blue would be okay? I have a feeling of keeping them the same, but it's worth knowing.
1
Pro
May 02, 2023 03:02 AM
13,930 Posts
Joined Aug 2004
avalon
Pro
May 02, 2023 03:02 AM
13,930 Posts
But it's helium right?

I want the air filled 4TB blues for $50

from a blog

Quote :
1.50-1.67TB/platter Section (all drives under here use platters that can hold 1.50, 1.60, or 1.67TB of data apiece.)

Blue (5640RPM, 128MB cache, SATA-600 interface, Advanced Format)

WD80EAZZ-xxBKLBx 8TB (5/10)

Note: These physically resemble the HGST Ultrastar DC HC320 (7K8), but they carry a WD-style R/N of 810032, and are distinct in overall spec.
Last edited by avalon May 1, 2023 at 09:14 PM.
3
May 02, 2023 04:10 AM
799 Posts
Joined Jan 2021

This comment has been rated as unhelpful by Slickdeals users.

May 02, 2023 05:17 AM
467 Posts
Joined Mar 2011
captmeach7May 02, 2023 05:17 AM
467 Posts
Quote from pholly :
Same price on Amazon if anyone is interested

Western Digital 8TB WD Blue PC Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5640 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, 128 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD80EAZZ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09KMGQ...PA57CXAMHE

Looks like you'll have to manually switch sellers to Amazon
Had this one in the watch list at 119. Switching the seller to Amazon works but says May 25th though.
1

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May 02, 2023 05:37 AM
95 Posts
Joined Aug 2010
ovenmageMay 02, 2023 05:37 AM
95 Posts
$12.50/TB, pretty good for some cheap storage? In for one.
May 02, 2023 02:54 PM
4,620 Posts
Joined Oct 2005
ElpeeMay 02, 2023 02:54 PM
4,620 Posts

Our community has rated this post as helpful. If you agree, why not thank Elpee

Wish it were Red.
Just bought some 8TB (renewed) $64 at eBay.
1
May 02, 2023 09:07 PM
130 Posts
Joined Nov 2011
filo4uMay 02, 2023 09:07 PM
130 Posts

Our community has rated this post as helpful. If you agree, why not thank filo4u

Thanks, OP! Great price on these. Finally going to upgrade the 4TB drives on my NAS. I prefer these slower-spinning drives. They produce less heat and are generally quieter. Yes, they are slower but if you're transferring files within your home gig network like me you won't notice the difference.
1
May 02, 2023 09:57 PM
840 Posts
Joined Oct 2017
AndrepartthreeMay 02, 2023 09:57 PM
840 Posts

Our community has rated this post as helpful. If you agree, why not thank Andrepartthree

I can second what Elpee says in that I had a great experience with a Western Digital Red Plus that got shipped to me twice by mistake because amazon kept sending them to me instead of the 1 TB W.D. Black I was trying to order Stick Out Tongue .. had to return the second one but they generously let me kept the first one for free (which I'm guessing is NOT a normal amazon thing to do the amazon rep must have been in a really good mood that day , not that I'm complaining Smilie ) .. said drive served me faithfully for two years as a desktop drive of all things for file storage and only pulled it out of my PC to swap it for a bigger capacity drive was still working fine when I pulled it out.

Newegg has the 8 TB for $130 for the Red Plus which is more expensive but does come with a 3 year warranty provided you believe WD will honor it to begin with Smilie ( I say this only because I personally have never used their warranty for all I know they honor it just fine wiser heads than mine can probably comment on this .. also edit and update sorry everyone Frown and thanks for pointing this out sr71, I originally said 5 year warranty in my original post, it's a 3 year warranty on the Red Plus models)

https://www.newegg.com/red-plus-w...6822234504

And because I'm paranoid Stick Out Tongue I double checked and also noticed the blue WD drive the OP posted is a CMR drive which are supposed to be better than SMR's though there's a whole raging debate about that on various forums including slickdeals (personally I like to play it safe and stick with CMR)

https://nascompares.com/answer/li...rives-hdd/


(something I forgot to mention in this post originally looks like the WD Red Plus is also CMR)

https://documents.westerndigital....us-hdd.pdf

If the drive fails after two years (Blue) or three years (Red) it's worth checking with your credit card company, they might have automatically extended the warranty by one year .. how many hoops they'll make you jump through and if they'll give you a credit for the purchase price back to your card varies from card to card but absolutely worth keeping an electronic pdf copy of the receipt and taking a picture of the serial number on the drive and keeping that safely backed up...

I've seen a number of people online state that Western Digital makes more reliable hard drives and to stay away from seagate including people who work in the I.T. ("computer guy" at a company) department.. but I've also seen others who say that's anecdotal info who are also professional "computer guys" for a living and they just go with whatever drive gives the best bang for their buck regardless of the manufacturer. One tech expert mentioned they've had good luck.. sort of.. with seagate but if you go the cheaper route.. pay $10 to mail the drive in to seagate.. expect them to hang onto the drive for a LONG while (month or longer) and do everything they can to repair the drive and ship it back rather than just immediately mailing out a refurbished drive to you should you use their warranty. You could also pay more money for them to immediately ship out a replacement drive BUT seagate will charge you the cost for the drive they immediately ship out to you if they determine that the drive you mailed in to them is in fact not defective so not worth the risk to me personally.

So why am I babbling so much about seagate? Well there's this

https://www.newegg.com/seagate-fi...6822185036

So you might look at that and go " wow , 8 TB , 7200 rpm drive with a 5 year warranty for $110? I'll buy that instead." And I did.. but then there's this

https://studio.youtube.com/video/...kqQlM/edit

A noisy hard drive doesn't bother me as far as the noise itself per se (don't care as long as it's the noise it's SUPPOSED to make) but it's driving me nuts trying to figure out if my brand new firecuda drive is defective or if that's just the sound 8 TB and other high capacity hard drives normally make. I've posted on three tech support type forums so far, one flat out said hard drive sounds are hard to diagnose and to just use it until it dies and not to worry if it's behaving itself and so far it is (it's passed various hard drive tests I'll get into below).

Another very friendly and helpful guy on another forum was like " dude I own 35 to 40 hard drives at any one time send that sucker right back it's going to die on you soon they are NOT supposed to make sounds like that."

On a third forum on reddit someone with a fairly good reputation there (on reddit that means a high karma score) seemed to feel the hard drive sound was normal but also mentioned he feels seagate drives are lower quality and fail sooner than other drives.

If you have an external usb 3.0 dock for hard drives you can plug sata drives into (well worth the cost in my opinion and I found even the cheap no name brands work just fine) it's absolutely worth plugging the drive into the dock and connecting it to your PC first to confirm it's not making any funny sounds as I found out the hard way (first firecuda drive made a steady clicking sound and was DOA when I plugged it into the motherboard but this was probably due to the cardboard package being in rough banged up shape and newegg not using enough packaging for their hard drives, a common complaint but amazon's been known to do this too when mailing stuff to me) .

Here's a few hard drive diagnostic tools you can download

https://www.seagate.com/support/d.../seatools/

https://support-en.wd.com/app/ans...a_id/10346

https://hddscan.com/

https://crystalmark.info/en/softw...ldiskinfo/

others on this forum might recommend other hard drive diagnostic tools too but worth running at least the appropriate manufacturer tool (apparently the seagate one works for other non seagate hard drives too) plus hddscan and crystalmark on that new drive. Also helpful

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcGrEcn-tV4

One other thing worth noting... if you have stuff on your drive that can cause serious problems for you if it falls into the wrong hands (no I'm not talking about anything illegal Stick Out Tongue but I'm sure lots of people have files on their PC that can cause say personal or financial or both kinds of ruin ).. well on the one hand I've been told you want to run DBAN

https://dban.org/

before you send that hard drive in under warranty.. or do a full, not quick, format from disk management.. but I've also been told this can take.. no joke.. 48 hours or more for 8 TB drives like this one. (edit and update see the very helpful comments by MWink, he says maybe 13 hours which is different than what I've been told but if you look at his comments he definitely knows his computer hardware Smilie )

So you'd have to decide if you feel comfortable letting your PC run for two days in a row (or far less demanding just 13 hours) though I've also been told that a lot of people let their PC's run 24/7, 365 days a year anyways with no harm done to their PC's. Sure you could do say a quick format which takes a lot less time and which I used to think would wipe all your data.. bad news, it doesn't, anyone with right file recovery programs could pull those files from your drive. Tech experts I've spoken to online insist on DBAN before they'll even consider sending a drive in that's under warranty.

Sorry for the usual long wall of text, this is all stuff I wish I'd known before grabbing a 8 TB drive I hope it helps someone else.

If nothing else given how low hard drive prices are and depending on how much space you need for your files you could grab two of these or two 8 TB drives in general from different manufacturers to hedge your bets, put one in an external enclosure and use it for periodic backups of your files and of Windows and keep the other one as the file storage type drive in your PC and also for Windows backups.

https://www.newegg.com/p/1Z4-002P...002P-024F9

final bit of rambling there.. grabbed that one from newegg as well for $120 (seagate exos 7E10 , 8 TB drive 7200 rpm , 5 year warranty) and it's been working great these past few weeks, had a very occasional whining sound that alarmed me at first but I've been told this is just the drive automatically powering itself on and off .. not normally meant for desktop drive use but I've seen reports of happy users using it for just that and it's working out great for them... it definitely doesn't alarm me with it's noises the way the firecuda drive does ! Smilie
Last edited by Andrepartthree May 3, 2023 at 12:21 PM.
2
1
May 03, 2023 12:35 AM
2,330 Posts
Joined Oct 2011
MWinkMay 03, 2023 12:35 AM
2,330 Posts

Our community has rated this post as helpful. If you agree, why not thank MWink

Quote from Andrepartthree :
I can second what Elpee says in that I had a great experience with a Western Digital Red Plus that got shipped to me twice by mistake because amazon kept sending them to me instead of the 1 TB W.D. Black I was trying to order Stick Out Tongue .. had to return the second one but they generously let me kept the first one for free (which I'm guessing is NOT a normal amazon thing to do the amazon rep must have been in a really good mood that day , not that I'm complaining Smilie ) .. said drive served me faithfully for two years as a desktop drive of all things for file storage and only pulled it out of my PC to swap it for a bigger capacity drive was still working fine when I pulled it out.

Newegg has the 8 TB for $130 for the Red Plus which is more expensive but does come with a 5 year warranty provided you believe WD will honor it to begin with Smilie ( I say this only because I personally have never used their warranty for all I know they honor it just fine wiser heads than mine can probably comment on this)

https://www.newegg.com/red-plus-w...6822234504

And because I'm paranoid Stick Out Tongue I double checked and also noticed it's a CMR drive which are supposed to be better than SMR's though there's a whole raging debate about that on various forums including slickdeals (personally I like to play it safe and stick with CMR)

https://nascompares.com/answer/li...rives-hdd/

If the drive fails after two years it's worth checking with your credit card company, they might have automatically extended the warranty by one year .. how many hoops they'll make you jump through and if they'll give you a credit for the purchase price back to your card varies from card to card but absolutely worth keeping an electronic pdf copy of the receipt and taking a picture of the serial number on the drive and keeping that safely backed up...

I've seen a number of people online state that Western Digital makes more reliable hard drives and to stay away from seagate including people who work in the I.T. ("computer guy" at a company) department.. but I've also seen others who say that's anecdotal info who are also professional "computer guys" for a living and they just go with whatever drive gives the best bang for their buck regardless of the manufacturer. One tech expert mentioned they've had good luck.. sort of.. with seagate but if you go the cheaper route.. pay $10 to mail the drive in to seagate.. expect them to hang onto the drive for a LONG while (month or longer) and do everything they can to repair the drive and ship it back rather than just immediately mailing out a refurbished drive to you should you use their warranty. You could also pay more money for them to immediately ship out a replacement drive BUT seagate will charge you the cost for the drive they immediately ship out to you if they determine that the drive you mailed in to them is in fact not defective so not worth the risk to me personally.

So why am I babbling so much about seagate? Well there's this

https://www.newegg.com/seagate-fi...6822185036

So you might look at that and go " wow , 8 TB , 7200 rpm drive with a 5 year warranty for $110? I'll buy that instead." And I did.. but then there's this

https://studio.youtube.com/video/...kqQlM/edit

A noisy hard drive doesn't bother me as far as the noise itself per se (don't care as long as it's the noise it's SUPPOSED to make) but it's driving me nuts trying to figure out if my brand new firecuda drive is defective or if that's just the sound 8 TB and other high capacity hard drives normally make. I've posted on three tech support type forums so far, one flat out said hard drive sounds are hard to diagnose and to just use it until it dies and not to worry if it's behaving itself and so far it is (it's passed various hard drive tests I'll get into below).

Another very friendly and helpful guy on another forum was like " dude I own 35 to 40 hard drives at any one time send that sucker right back it's going to die on you soon they are NOT supposed to make sounds like that."

On a third forum on reddit someone with a fairly good reputation there (on reddit that means a high karma score) seemed to feel the hard drive sound was normal but also mentioned he feels seagate drives are lower quality and fail sooner than other drives.

If you have an external usb 3.0 dock for hard drives you can plug sata drives into (well worth the cost in my opinion and I found even the cheap no name brands work just fine) it's absolutely worth plugging the drive into the dock and connecting it to your PC first to confirm it's not making any funny sounds as I found out the hard way (first firecuda drive made a steady clicking sound and presumably was DOA when I plugged it into the motherboard but this was probably due to the cardboard package being in rough banged up shape and newegg not using enough packaging for their hard drives, a common complaint but amazon's been known to do this too when mailing stuff to me) .

Here's a few hard drive diagnostic tools you can download

https://www.seagate.com/support/d.../seatools/

https://support-en.wd.com/app/ans...a_id/10346

https://hddscan.com/

https://crystalmark.info/en/softw...ldiskinfo/

others on this forum might recommend other hard drive diagnostic tools too but worth running at least the appropriate manufacturer tool (apparently the seagate one works for other non seagate hard drives too) plus hddscan and crystalmark on that new drive. Also helpful

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcGrEcn-tV4

One other thing worth noting... if you have stuff on your drive that can cause serious problems for you if it falls into the wrong hands (no I'm not talking about anything illegal Stick Out Tongue but I'm sure lots of people have files on their PC that can cause say personal or financial or both kinds of ruin ).. well on the one hand I've been told you want to run DBAN

https://dban.org/

before you send that hard drive in under warranty.. or do a full, not quick, format from disk management.. but I've also been told this can take.. no joke.. 48 hours or more for 8 TB drives like this one. So you'd have to decide if you feel comfortable letting your PC run for two days in a row though I've also been told that a lot of people let their PC's run 24/7, 365 days a year anyways with no harm done to their PC's. Sure you could do say a quick format which takes a lot less time and which I used to think would wipe all your data.. bad news, it doesn't, anyone with right file recovery programs could pull those files from your drive. Tech experts I've spoken to online insist on DBAN before they'll even consider sending a drive in that's under warranty.

Sorry for the usual long wall of text, this is all stuff I wish I'd known before grabbing a 8 TB drive I hope it helps someone else.

If nothing else given how low hard drive prices are and depending on how much space you need for your files you could grab two of these or two 8 TB drives in general from different manufacturers to hedge your bets, put one in an external enclosure and use it for periodic backups of your files and of Windows and keep the other one as the file storage type drive in your PC.

https://www.newegg.com/p/1Z4-002P...002P-024F9

final bit of rambling there.. grabbed that one from newegg as well for $120 (seagate exos 7E10 , 8 TB drive 7200 rpm , 5 year warranty) and it's been working great these past few weeks, had a very occasional whining sound that alarmed me at first but I've been told this is just the drive automatically powering itself on and off .. not normally meant for desktop drive use but I've seen reports of happy users using it for just that and it's working out great for them... it definitely doesn't alarm me with it's noises the way the firecuda drive does ! Smilie
There's a lot of good info in here. Like many, I've been pretty sour on Seagate for about 15 years now. There's just too much data (statistical, anecdotal, and personal) pointing to them being less reliable than other companies. I recently decided to give them another try, thinking maybe things had changed but it doesn't seem to be the case. One of the Exos drives I recently purchased is obviously struggling. It passes diagnostics but I can sometimes hear that it's having trouble. I regret not sending it back during the return period. Part of me is hoping that it will hurry up and die, so I can get it replaced under warranty.

BTW, I'm not sure DBAN is really necessary anymore. A secure erase or single-pass overwrite should be sufficient, unless maybe you have something super sensitive on there. It will still take a number of hours but not 48 on an 8TB drive. A quick format is definitely inadequate and easy to recover data from, even using free utilities.

Also, some people suggest encrypting the drive. That way, should it unexpectedly completely fail, you can send it in without having to worry about wiping it first.
1
May 03, 2023 01:47 AM
840 Posts
Joined Oct 2017
AndrepartthreeMay 03, 2023 01:47 AM
840 Posts
Quote from MWink :
There's a lot of good info in here. Like many, I've been pretty sour on Seagate for about 15 years now. There's just too much data (statistical, anecdotal, and personal) pointing to them being less reliable than other companies. I recently decided to give them another try, thinking maybe things had changed but it doesn't seem to be the case. One of the Exos drives I recently purchased is obviously struggling. It passes diagnostics but I can sometimes hear that it's having trouble. I regret not sending it back during the return period. Part of me is hoping that it will hurry up and die, so I can get it replaced under warranty.

BTW, I'm not sure DBAN is really necessary anymore. A secure erase or single-pass overwrite should be sufficient, unless maybe you have something super sensitive on there. It will still take a number of hours but not 48 on an 8TB drive. A quick format is definitely inadequate and easy to recover data from, even using free utilities.

Also, some people suggest encrypting the drive. That way, should it unexpectedly completely fail, you can send it in without having to worry about wiping it first.
(slaps head) now why didn't I think of that? If I encrypt it I can have my cake and eat it too and use that warranty thank you very much for that Smilie

If you don't mind me picking your brains a bit more Smilie (and thanks for the kind comments on my gigantic wall of text and actually wading through the whole thing Stick Out Tongue ) ... a secure erase or single pass overwrite... would one way of doing that be just doing a regular (not quick) format in Windows? And if so rough guess, in the case of the firecuda 7200 rpm, 3.5 drive, how long would a normal format take?
May 03, 2023 02:34 AM
1,893 Posts
Joined May 2004
ECarlsonMay 03, 2023 02:34 AM
1,893 Posts
Quote from captmeach7 :
Had this one in the watch list at 119. Switching the seller to Amazon works but says May 25th though.
Says June 9 for me for the one shipped and sold by Amazon. Maybe they'll get more in stock soon, and still have the $99 price, with 2 day shipping.

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May 03, 2023 03:37 AM
2,330 Posts
Joined Oct 2011
MWinkMay 03, 2023 03:37 AM
2,330 Posts
Quote from Andrepartthree :
(slaps head) now why didn't I think of that? If I encrypt it I can have my cake and eat it too and use that warranty thank you very much for that Smilie

If you don't mind me picking your brains a bit more Smilie (and thanks for the kind comments on my gigantic wall of text and actually wading through the whole thing Stick Out Tongue ) ... a secure erase or single pass overwrite... would one way of doing that be just doing a regular (not quick) format in Windows? And if so rough guess, in the case of the firecuda 7200 rpm, 3.5 drive, how long would a normal format take?
Glad to be of help. Yes, a regular format in Windows would probably be adequate. On a modern 8TB drive it will probably take somewhere in the ballpark of 13 hours or so. I tested a 16TB Seagate Exos a while back and I think it took around 26 hours.

You can potentially get a very good idea by using a program that can pull capability data from the drive. There's a utility included with many Linux distributions that works well for this. The command is:

sudo hdparm -I /dev/sd?

The ? would be replaced by whatever ID the drive currently has. If it's the only drive connected to the system it would usually be sda. If there are other drives, it could be sdb, sdc, etc. Also, the command is case sensitive. That's a capital "I" in there. It will spit out a bunch of info about the drive. Near the end, there will be a Security section and one of the lines should read something like "???min for SECURITY ERASE." You can also use hdparm to execute the secure erase but that's a little more complicated. If you want the info on how to do it, let me know.

An easier alternative is to use the graphical GSmartControl utility. This is available for Windows and Linux. In the drive's Device Information, look under the Advanced > Capabilities tab. Look at the "Extended self-test routine recommended polling time." This should give you a relatively similar number.

A note on encrypting the drive, if it has ever been used to store any unencrypted data, the entire drive should be overwritten first. Ideally, it should be overwritten with random or encrypted data but that's not strictly necessary. Some encryption programs have the option to do this. In-place encryption may also be an option and wouldn't require deleting existing data but would take just as long (not counting time to transfer the data off and back on to the drive).

As for your noisy drive, it's complicated. I've diagnosed a lot of drives over the years and have a pretty good ear for what is and isn't right. Unfortunately, it's become harder because modern drives tend to make a lot more "weird" noises, especially when idle. I'm not sure I can offer much advice on your Firecuda because I've never worked with one.

If you want to keep your Exos from going into low power mode, you can use Seagate's SeaChest utilities. These drives do not support conventional APM, so most other utilities won't work for this purpose. SeaChest can be used to disable (or adjust) the EPC and PowerBalance features. I believe I wrote a post containing the exact commands some time ago. Let me know if you have further questions.
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