How does this drive compare to a WD Black 2TB if used as a desktop drive?
525711
This particular drive has a very low real-world failure rate, as verified by an ongoing study by a company known as Backblaze. WD generally doesn't fair as well, though 2TB WD drives are not currently part of the study. You can see the September 2014 update from Backblaze here: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-update-september-2014/ In addition, any time you have two drives that have the same form factor (3.5" in this case) running at the same RPM (7200) and with the same cache, but one is higher capacity than the other, the higher capacity drive will almost always have higher sustained read/write rates. The reason is better areal density: more bits packed into the same space means more will pass the read/write head with every rotation of the platters. This makes higher capacity drives desirable not only for their increased storage capacity, but also increased speed. Finally, just because this drive has "NAS" written on the box, doesn't mean it's not well suited for desktop use. It's not cutting corners in this case, it's actually shooting for higher standards. NAS can be a punishing workload for drives, with lots of continuous access. Typical desktop use will be a walk in the park in comparison. In short, if you're after a reliable, speedy, high capacity drive, this is an excellent choice.
629560
Seagate vs WD. I've used them both over the years, along with Maxtor. For myself and some people Seagate=good and WD=bad, and for others, just the opposite. What's interesting in these comments is that the usage habits are not known, i.e., how intensely is the hard drive being accessed (applications, pro versus consumer, etc), and, in what environment is the hard drive being used (air quality, room temperature, humidity, appropriate case cooling, physical vibration, etc.). Those are the useful comparatives that would help in these reviews. Otherwise, it's just comparing one's FOTD (flavor of the day). Seagate vs WD. I've used them both over the years, along with Maxtor. For myself and some people Seagate=good and WD=bad, and for others, just the opposite. What's interesting in these comments is that the usage habits are not known, i.e., how intensely is the hard drive being accessed (applications, pro versus consumer, etc), and, in what environment is the hard drive being used (air quality, room temperature, humidity, appropriate case cooling, physical vibration, etc.). Those are the useful comparatives that would help in these reviews. Otherwise, it's just comparing one's FOTD (flavor... » Read More Seagate vs WD. I've used them both over the years, along with Maxtor. For myself and some people Seagate=good and WD=bad, and for others, just the opposite. What's interesting in these comments is that the usage habits are not known, i.e., how intensely is the hard drive being accessed (applications, pro versus consumer, etc), and, in what environment is the hard drive being used (air quality, room temperature, humidity, appropriate case cooling, physical vibration, etc.). Those are the useful comparatives that would help in these reviews. Otherwise, it's just comparing one's FOTD (flavor of the day). « Show Less
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You can us it as a normal drive. The main difference between a desktop drive and a nas drive are some modifications to the firmware, like TLER:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_recovery_control
1104138
I installed a 2TB Western Digital internal drive and it works just fine. You can transfer files from your main PC onto this internal drive with the supplied cable that comes with this unit. My set up works great
807230
If you are trying to use this as an internal HDD, you might want to double check on the size there. That's a 3.5" HDD commonly used in desktops; unless you were planning on using this drive in an external HDD rig I would suggest you look into the 2.5" HDDs.*Suggestion: go with <Western Digital Bare Drives 2.5 Inch, Low Profile, 5400 RPM, SATA II, 8MB Cache 500GB Mobile Hard Drive, Blue WD5000LPVT> it's only $3 more ($43.99) than that desktop HDD for double the capacity.
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both are SATA. the major difference comes between the Western Digital Red Blue and Green lines. Red is Network Attached storage and server line quality. usually they are better built than your standard Blue but cost more than the Blue. as i just mentioned the WD Blue is the mainstream line drive. Green is a more energy efficient line of hard drive.For example i had a computer with a old Quantium Fireball IDE drive and i replaced it with a larger Western Digital Blue IDE and it worked fine.
327046
Sure is - any 2.5" Sata HDD will do the trick. I do recommend upgrading to the WD Black rather than Bare. They're built better and have faster read/write speeds.
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WD Black is much higher performance and you can use it for the boot drive and have all 4 Terabytes show up unless your computer and your operating system are still in the stone age. However if your OS is 64 bit, then your computer is going to see all 4. The WD Blacks are all I've used for years and this newest one is the BEST and FASTEST OF ALL THE Wd's on the market today. You can use it for any purpose and you'll get the best performance over any others.
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Yes, but since its optimized for NAS, it will be somewhat slower than a desktop optimized drive.
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I haven't had any problems with any of the 3.5" drives I have tried. I think I have a Western Digital Green 1Tb in one and a 1.5Tb in the other at the moment (I have two, one for my main drive, the second for my backup).
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I just had a Western Digital 2TB My Book fail miserably (miserably!!! Dead!) after two months. I've never had any other drive fail (and I've used much smaller capacity WD external drives w/out issue in the past). But i'm now a Seagate (1TB Freeagent) user because I won't trust the larger WD's any longer. Once bitten! ;) Since the failure, many of my colleagues have admitted the same type of failure from their WD's and are using Seagates with good results. If you search online, you'll see very mixed reviews with similar negative views of the Seagates, but I can only speak from my own very frustrating experience with my WD. I just had a Western Digital 2TB My Book fail miserably (miserably!!! Dead!) after two months. I've never had any other drive fail (and I've used much smaller capacity WD external drives w/out issue in the past). But i'm now a Seagate (1TB Freeagent) user because I won't trust the larger WD's any longer. Once bitten! ;) Since the failure, many of my colleagues have admitted the same type of failure from their WD's and are using Seagates with good results. If you search online, you'll see very mixed reviews with similar negative views of the Seagates, but I can only speak from my own very... » Read More I just had a Western Digital 2TB My Book fail miserably (miserably!!! Dead!) after two months. I've never had any other drive fail (and I've used much smaller capacity WD external drives w/out issue in the past). But i'm now a Seagate (1TB Freeagent) user because I won't trust the larger WD's any longer. Once bitten! ;) Since the failure, many of my colleagues have admitted the same type of failure from their WD's and are using Seagates with good results. If you search online, you'll see very mixed reviews with similar negative views of the Seagates, but I can only speak from my own very frustrating experience with my WD. « Show Less
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4TB drive is the fastest of the bunch since it has more platters than the 2TB or 1TB version. So if you are looking for the fastest non-SSD drive out there, it would be the 4TB version of the WD Black.
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Building on the answer provided by Erin, the Western Digital SE model is an Enterprise class hard drive specifically designed for SMB NAS six to twelve drive bay devices. The Black drive has the five year warranty and a version of vibration control but the Black drive is not meant to spin continuously under load in a NAS or RAID environment. The Black drive is designed as a stand-alone, single drive implementation unit. The Black drives lack the RAID-specific, time-limited error recovery (TLER). This prevents drive fallout caused by the extended hard drive error-recovery processes common to desktop drives, such as the Black drive. The new metric for drive selection is really workload. The Western Digital RED drives for light workload, SE for Medium, and RE for Heavy workloads. The workload is determined by the amount of data transfer to the drive (and the ability to dissipate the heat that is generated by the frequency of the transfers.) An SE Drive is rated for approximately 180TB/year of Data Transfer while an RE is rated for approximately 550TB/year of Data Transfer. Most Desktop Drives, even the Black, will have a significantly shortened life if placed in to a NAS or RAID environment due to the sustained workload. When a vendor integrates a Desktop drive in to a NAS or Low End Server, the vendor (i.e. Dell) will usually reduce the warranty of the Desktop hard drive to one year due to the increased stress on the Desktop drive and the almost certain premature drive failure irrespective of the manufacturers actual hard drive warranty. (When drives ship with a system, the warranty is usually provided by the vendor of the system and not the drive manufacturer.)
533167
From what I've read, make sure the firmware on the Drobo is up to date you should be fine with drives > 2TB.
1421597
It's exactly like a portable hard drive. The difference is,it's solid state and has no moving parts.
1352569
I have the WDE1UBK10000N and it is a solid well built external! I don't think you can go wrong with the elements terabyte hdd!
778515
I used this drive in my desktop running Windows 7 and I have no complaints so far. It's been a few months and it runs way faster than it did with XP and a platter based hard drive.