WD - easystore 8TB External USB 3.0 Hard Drive - Black

I bought a few of these 8TB externals. It's common knowledge now that these externals have 8TB Western Digital Red drives inside of them. It's the reason why I went with Western Digital, and specifically not Seagate (with their shingle technology). They are very easy to "shuck," allowing you to run them internally using SATA. However, the reason for the 4-star rating is that most consumers will not shuck them, and they do run hot inside of their casing. Temperatures exceed 45c at idle, and do reach 50c with use. Given they are WD Red drives, I'm confident they will survive those temperatures within the warranty period (2 years), but it's been tested and proven that hard drives do not do so well in terms of longevity with temperatures in excess of 40c. If you do shuck them, they run very cool; and you don't even have to install them internally. Just popping off the outer casing, and running a small fan on top keeps temperatures within 32-36c. I personally have 140mm fans blowing on top of mine still running on USB. My internal 8TB actually runs hotter due to less ventilation in my computer. Just keep in mind that if you shuck them and break the case, it will void the warranty. So outweigh the pros and cons before, and do your research on "proper shucking" :) Overall very satisfied with these 8TB Red NAS 256MB Cache drives.

I usually don't like writing reviews cos there are always pseudo techies somewhere telling people what to do and what to do. Funny enough, 90 percent of them leave reviews that either ruin a product's rating or ruin other people takes or experiences with them. Fortunately, I'm a high IT Systems Admin with a dozen of years experience under my belt, so I move through these chuff deemed helpful reviews. I bought 8 of these drive for my FreeNAS build and they have been perfect so far. Shucking them was very easy and I can honestly say the cases or enclosures are all perfectly intact with not even a single scratch on them. All I used was a simple flat head screw driver, some patience and a sprinkle of common sense. There's no need to force these puppies open. Took less than a minute to open each enclosure. I kept all the internals, closed it back up and boxed for potential warranty purposes. See below for photos. In terms of whether you'd find Red NAS 256mb drives in these, that possible as well. I got 8 of them; 2 and then 6 from two different locations. All Reds! The secret is in the serial numbers. Hopefully you can pick that up from my photos as well. These work very well and have been working for me for almost 6 months now. They start off slightly noisy, but as you start to fill them up they really do quiet down. I have 8 in my case and I hear my low rpm fans before I hear these puppies. I am running all eight drives off of a P20 IT Mode flashed IBM ServeRAID M1015 card. Average read speed for all eight drives at full throttle is around 800mb/s and works superbly in FreeNAS 9.3+ in raid z configuration. The total raw storage of 58TB (not 64) is used to house my Plex library. I keep my OS and Plex Jail on separate raided SSDs for performance and redundancy purposes. My FreeNAS OS runs on two raided 60GB Corsair Force GTs and the Plex Jail runs off of two raided 180GB Intel SSDs. The OS runs pretty fast and Plex does all its work without having to access the Red drives for nothing but library updates and video playback. My server motherboard houses three Intel Pro 1000 gigabit NICs, but I added another Intel quad i350 NIC with LACP enabled for a more balance network access of the drives. I even added a HDHomerun Quattro for Live TV and DVR option to my Plex server thanks to the tons of space these drives provide. My Plex library is almost 22TB large and comprises of over 3000 movies in 1080P or better, tons of collected TV Drama, Anime and Sitcoms. Friends and family here and abroad stream videos off it and these drives handles them all flawlessly. Multiple users usually streaming at a time as well. They are great and haven't broken a sweat. Only issues I had was some data corruption when my server lost power during a rainstorm while data was being written to the drives. A quick zpool scrub was all I needed to fix that. They are flawless, trust me. I need to buy 2 more when they get back on sale. I guess I could only add 2 photos max. LOL

Not a good choice if you have a Synology NAS that you want to backup once a day. I bought it with the expectation that I would use the "Hibernation" function to spin up/down the WD drive, rather then let it needlessly run 24/7. With Snology's Hyper Backup program, the process is easy to set up. However, WD does NOT provide any tools or configuration tips to manage the easystore with a NAS running a Linux OS. Instead, I'm using a Cable Matters USB HDD/SSD drive adapter attached and configured on the NAS. A 6TB WD Red HDD is installed and works GREAT. The drive spins down after 20 minutes of no activity, then spins up when the scheduled Hyper Backup kicks off. The backups are saved flawlessly every day. Now, I will say that the easystore does work fine for those backups IF and ONLY IF the drive is formatted for Linux and left spinning 24/7. Unfortunately, for me, that just won't do. A single USB drive that is constantly running outside of a raid, seems foolish to me and makes the easystore a bad choice for my NAS's data protection needs. See the attached photo of the Cable Matters USB adapter with a WD Red drive. This is my working solution for my backups of the NAS.

I've had no problems with this storage drive. this is my second "easystore" and I'm ready for a second larger one. Nice having all my movies at a cords reach!

This is my second 8TB Easy Store. I have 0 complaints. Cheap, quiet and they help me increase my media collection. Best bargain around.

Bought 6 to shuck for a RAID10 for $180 each. Bought a 7th one for $160 on Black Friday to add as hot spare. The drive inside retails for $250 at the moment.

I got this on sale, and I use it to store all my old school games

Packaging and everything looked fine. Opened up Speccy to check the SMART values, saw that the drive had been powered on 510 times and was on for 107.4 days. Let's put that in perspective. If the average computer is on for 8 hours a day, that is nearly a year of use. This was supposed to be a new drive.