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

To save people time, this is CMR (the good one).

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 !

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.