@cayars said:
I eventually took them out of the enclosures, reformatted then and put them in a HDD cases that holds 8 drives each to simplify the cabling and power.
That doesn’t tend to be an option anymore, as the USB controller is integrated into the drive itself to cut costs and they no longer have a normal SATA connection. If you want a standard SATA drive now, you need to buy a bare drive and put it into your own enclosure.
I just purchased a 6TB WD external drive yesterday from Walmart and pulled it. Still working just fine for me. It’s just a normal drive with a mini USB to SATA board screwed in that you remove. I am curious however if you have any links to anything about this? That would sort of suck if they are manufacturing drives specifically for the enclosures (different quality?)
@cayars said:
I eventually took them out of the enclosures, reformatted then and put them in a HDD cases that holds 8 drives each to simplify the cabling and power.
That doesn’t tend to be an option anymore, as the USB controller is integrated into the drive itself to cut costs and they no longer have a normal SATA connection. If you want a standard SATA drive now, you need to buy a bare drive and put it into your own enclosure.
I just purchased a 6TB WD external drive yesterday from Walmart and pulled it. Still working just fine for me. It’s just a normal drive with a mini USB to SATA board screwed in that you remove. I am curious however if you have any links to anything about this? That would sort of suck if they are manufacturing drives specifically for the enclosures (different quality?)
From what i heard they are generally lower quality drives, and i am using one now, they are NOT made for constant 24/7 operation for streaming plex local and remote access. Which is why i got 4 Internal Western digital RED NAS drives and put them inside my tower via SATA and set them up as 1 large volume using Drivepool (stable bit) software. This does not mean you cannot use an external, i used one for 6+ months until i found out its not the best if you are going to have alot of traffic on your PLEX server. I hope that helps a little.
I just purchased a 6TB WD external drive yesterday from Walmart and pulled it. Still working just fine for me. It’s just a normal drive with a mini USB to SATA board screwed in that you remove.
Probably because it’s a 3.5" drive? I think this might just be with 2.5" drive where size matters.
I am curious however if you have any links to anything about this? That would sort of suck if they are manufacturing drives specifically for the enclosures (different quality?)
I wasn’t aware of some big page about this, it’s been going on a few years now. A quick search turned up this (see post #6):
Yes I’m aware the 2.5" drives are different but I was referring to the 3.5" My Books which are just normal desktop drives.
There is nothing “unreliable” about them as they are normal drives. They aren’t meant to be used in a NAS that uses special controllers that handle error detection since it can cause slow downs in RAID environments when certain things happen. But if you are using them as JBODs or with stablebit they work just as good as any other drive. You don’t gain anything from using a RED drive in this type of environment.
Actually when you think about it a Plex storage environment is an EASY environment for drives. You basically write the data once and then just read it back many times. Doesn’t really get easier than that. It’s your HIGH WRITE environments where having a NAS type drive might help.
With that said these wouldn’t be a drive I would choose to use as my main drives in a SQL server or similar (unless for backups).
PS My local Walmart had the 6TB externals on sale for $169 which is a good price so…
