A reliable external storage solution, the WD Elements 3TB Desktop Hard Drive has plenty of space to back up your files and transfer data to and from compatible devices. Small and lightweight, it’s easy to take the hard drive out when life requires you to be on the go.
Mod: Removed duplicate from title.
Just an NB that iirc WD drives are NOT shuckable as the USB port is soldered on. Is that still the case?
for this model and case type i think yes, had one of these fail and couldn't even try to troubleshoot as the connector was soldered
Correct. Have 3 dead ones here
Yes, would never recommend anyone to get a WD 2.5" Portable drive as they have no native sata interface and just directly solder the USB connector to the drive.
In my experience the USB controller board is the biggest point of failure aside from someone dropping a hard drive and physically damaging the disk.
For all other brands you just crack open the case and take out the drive and connect it to your PCs SATA connector and can recover all of the files and even put the drive into another cheap case like the Orico ones that go on sale quite often.
Do not buy this drive.
Yep, all of mine have been USB board failures. They stopped working at USB3 speed and would work when plugged into a USB 2.0 port, but that didn't last forever. WD are absolutely stupid for wasting good drives like this
"Do Not Buy This Drive, Eva, Does Not Recommended"
+Voted
LOL!
Weren't these like $89 bucks towards the end of last year?
Would rather get a Seagate from Officeworks for $1 more - https://www.officeworks.com.au/shop/officeworks/p/seagate-3t…
Why? The last few Seagate deals have had quite a few comments about their reliability.
Like those above, I've had 2 WD drives fail, so I won't go near WD.
Like those above, I've had 2 WD drives fail, so I won't go near WD.
I was the same until I had 4 Seagates fail in a row, have been WD ever since then..
Your friendly reminder that all drives fail, and quite regularly, so keep your backups up to date yo
@DeviousDan: Yep spread my data across multiple drives from different brands. I just had a bad patch with seagate. one drive died after the 3rd power on after 2 weeks after purchasing and I would have had it on in total for 6 hours only.
I've been using Toshiba drives internal and external and they just don't die (touch wood).
Seagate is worse mate, even with your WD failures..
Literally it does not matter. In this thread there are people stating these have died on them, in a Seagate thread there will be "this failed on me" posts.
I have a mix of WD, Seagate and Toshiba mostly used as cold storage, not a single failure.
cold storage?
@Ulysses31: ah okay, similar to what I do then. They're only for storage of files I don't access frequently.
Thus, question to everyone here is are all of their portable hard drives connected and run all the time?
All brands fail, but at least with the Seagate you can remove the bare drive and plug it into a dock to try to recover data (especially if it's the USB SATA interface board that's broken).
Seagate has two models of extremely unreliable 2.5" drives (known as Rosewood) using tech they acquired from Samsung, they're 7mm thick aluminium foil sealed 1 and 2TB drives. 2.5" drives above 3TB from Seagate are 15mm thick and use totally different design and apparently much more reliable.
Why spend an extra $1. This is Ozbargain.
One reason I could think of in this specific instance is that I don't want to spend any time driving to a shop and picking this up, when officeworks will deliver it to my address for free.
Also to avoid giving anything to Gerry.
Being a mechanical hard drive I would want to limit the amount of times it is in transit with 3rd parties. You could have a careless delivery person tossing the parcel around like a frisbie so I would pick it up if the store was close enough.
Oh. See above. Seagate drives can be removed from enclosure in case of USB controller failure.
I've had nothing but issues ever with seagate, exactly 0 with WD.
I have had 0 issues with Seagate and had issues with 1 of my WD drive but this was like 10years ago lol. I am still using an old portable 2tb seagate that cost me like $150 and is probably 6-7 years old. They both obviously can have issues but at least Seagate don't solder the usb board to the drive. Personally I would prefer Seagate.
Honest question: Officeworks will delivery the seagate for free (premium same day delivery). Is there any reason why I should get the WD Elements from Gerry instead?
All pending the convenience. If you pass the store on the way home, might as well pick it up.
But, It's showing out of stock?
I always used to rate WD ext. drives and then my portable 1 terabyte died recently… granted it is a few years old maybe even 6 or 7 but it wasn't used THAT much, well recently anyway.
But everyone here slams Seagate as rubbish so who bloody knows… the lesson should us I should have had another backup of the backup which I thought I had but can't even remember exactly what was on it haha….
Buy one of each brand, and make double backups. Extremely unlikely they'll both fail at the same time.
according to the smartdrive stats on my WD 3TB it's had over 7 years continuous operation, no problems with it at all.
thankyou CZ B-)
I've never had a problem with Seagate drives and I'm still using one that's at least 6+ years old. The one I had prior was Seagate and I sold it working 100% fine after a good 2-3 years of use… I believe the one I had before that was WD and it failed but this was 10+ years ago. I see a lot of people here talking about delivery but personally when I buy a mechanical hard drive I will pick up from a store and/or try to limit the amount of times the drive is in transit where it could get knocked around. Considering the comments about WD soldering their drives, personally I would stick with Seagate if I were buying a new drive right now.
Seagate acquired Samsung HDD division few years ago and used their design to manufacture thin 1 and 2TB drives. These are known as Rosewood and notoriously unreliable and hard to fix. If you avoid these perticular drives other Seagate HDD are totally fine. I hear that WD 2.5" thin models also use very similar design so it's probably a good idea to avoid them as well.
If you use different hard drives enough you'll experience failures with them all. You can't really base an experience off "i've had two fail out of three" or similar as you've got the odds of flipping a coin. Hard drives are fragile things and die the most out of any computer component (as far as my experience goes), especially external drives that are moved around and bumped constantly.
The best thing we can go off is backblaze hard drive stats, and these arent the same use case for home or external drive users.
Also not the same drives, AFAIK Backblaze does not use 2.5" HDD
is this fine to use for PS4 to expand the memory as ext hdd (not to replace the int HDD)
or is there a better brand.
It would be fine.
I wouldn’t buy anything from Gerry. I wouldn’t buy WD either so this is a good combo as far as I am concerned. Only thing it’s good for is to warn others not to spend money on the supplier or the manufacturer.
Only 2 paper per person.