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WD 5TB Elements Portable SE USB3.0 Hard Drive $145 Metro Delivered/C&C @ Officeworks ($137.75 Price Match + 5% off Code @ JB)

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Pretty good price for a Western Digital Element 5TB USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive from Officeworks.

Ordered myself by chatting with JB Online rep for a price match, and can confirm that the 5% discount code from this deal had worked. The final price through JB is $137.75.

JB Link: https://www.jbhifi.com.au/products/wd-elements-se-5tb-portab…

Copy & Paste of specifications from Officeworks website:

This WD Elements Portable Hard Drive allows you to take your files on the go, ensuring you're always prepared for a file transfer at work, school or uni, or it can be used for simply freeing up storage on your primary device. It's compatible with both USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 devices convenience.

  • This hard drive is designed for taking your files on the go.
  • This drive has a storage capacity of 5 TB.
  • It's compatible with both USB 2.0 and 3.0, ensuring that you get the fastest transfer speeds available on your device.
  • It's compatible with Windows operating systems.
  • A 2 year warranty is included.
  • It comes in the colour black.

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closed Comments

  • +1

    What drives are inside? Good for shucking?

    • No

    • +6

      Can't be shucked.

    • +1

      What does "shucking" mean?

      • +2

        Removing the case and using the HDD as is.

    • For shucking, see Seagate. WD almost never have shuckable drives.

  • +1

    What would be the most reliable external HDD for storing photos and videos that doesn't fail a few weeks/months later?

    • The cloud.

      • Whats cloud pricing like?

        • Too bad our NBN is capped at MAX 50Mbps unless you do some bonding or 5Gs

        • Check out Blackblaze. They have two types of storage both archiving and backup.

          Backing up is US$14 a month with 1year of Snapshots.

          Archiving costs $7.50 to store a TB per a month. Downloading the data costs extra.

      • Besides the cloud for us tgsg don't want to use that, any thoughts

    • OneDrive with Office 365 is my go to cloud storage. I have lifetime 250GB on my Live account and linking it with 365 subscription gave me 1TB+ .25TB storage for backups. Much cheaper option per GB compared to Google Drive, Apple iCloud and the other smaller players (Dropbox, Box). Only thing I hate is I have to manually delete my photos from my phone after backing up unlike Google Photo which can delete it automatically.

      Edit: Also you get 5-6 free account under 1 subscription under the Microsoft Family sharing to be shared with your friends and family and each will get Office 365 access and 1TB storage space

      • How and how much

      • 1) How did you get the lifetime 250GB on OneDrive?
        2) The photos that you upload on OneDrive, they do count towards the quota right? Unlike Google Photos if using storage saver and have a pre Pixel 6 model.
        3) With family account, is that 1 TB per member? So effectively 6 TB?

          1. I think it was some special deal with Samsung or Telstra ages ago, if you link your account. I can't remember. But they might still have these kind of deals if you google it

          2. Yes the photo counts to the quota. But Google photos now also counts toward the quota even with storage saver

          3. Yes effectively 6TB but maintaining separate backup across 6 accounts is a pain so I just use the my main one and the rest I gave it away to my family and friends

      • +1

        I have 1TB One Drive for business and I tested it by trying to synchronise 1 folder that was about 50GB and 70,000 files. See: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/restrictions-and-… The Windows One Drive client froze. Restarting the Sync did not work. Uploading via webpage failed. One Drive couldn't even get past 1%. I looked it up and One Drive has limitations on the number of files that make it useless as a local network alternative even though One Drive appears in Windows Explorer. Then if I was to upload in batches I might have been able to jam it into One Drive but with the stated limitations I had no confidence in how reliably I could access or backup those files. It was so horrifically slow to upload that I didn't want to have so much data stuck in One Drive that was not quick to retrieve.

        So whilst Microsoft claims to provide 1TB of storage in my test run and usage scenario it was a useless product. It's good for uploading small numbers of big files as I read that they increased the max file size.

        • +1

          OneDrive for Business is a different beast to OneDrive for Consumers - the former is based on Sharepoint, so it has all the Fun that comes with SharePoint (specifically, the desktop client tends to choke on around 75000-100000 files, and it can only handle, for want of a better word, 300,000), while the latter is not, so tends to work quite well.

          To put 70,000 files into OneDrive for Business, the preferred path is to use one of the migration tools which are infinitely more reliable for an ingest of such a large number of files. Probably not ideal for an ongoing backup, however. I did try using Veeam to back up to Onedrive for Business but this didn't work out well (it too choked on it but then again this was a nearly 400GB backup so I did not exactly have high expectations).

          OneDrive for Consumers tends to be much more reliable, I have about 55GB in my consumer Onedrive and that syncs perfectly well.

    • +8

      I bought cheap spinning 1tb wdd drives about 10 years ago for archiving files and mirrored them to an identical drive stored in another location for redundancy in case of fire or theft. I referred to them a few times a year, possibly up to a dozen.

      I just replaced those drives which are working fine with slightly faster, much bigger, even cheaper drives as they were almost full and getting old.

      So I'd say it's cheaper (and more convenient, secure etc.) to buy cheap mechanical spinning drives, with doubles for back-up than uploading your personal data to a server that could be hacked and will forever be charging you an annoying fixed cost.

      But if you're a renter, you might prefer that kind of thing, I prefer to own it forever and physically hold it in my hands.

      Call me an insecure untrusting weirdo with a penchant for conspiracy theories.

      • +1

        I'm the same, if your storing photos and docs you may be ok with the cloud but most people have TB's worth of video/music that's just not viable to upload all the time to the cloud. Also don't like the idea of admins going through your family videos etc

        • -1

          It’s not even just admins personally checking out your files (unlikely where there’s trillions of files on a server farm). It’s that many (most?) cloud storage services come with your agreement for them to data mine including for purposes of targeted advertising & market research, corporate espionage, facial recognition etc etc etc. Even photos can tell them SO much. Our data is a veritable revenue gold mine & they should be paying us. US based cloud services have way weaker privacy protections than EU based ones. Encryption in transit is also an issue for a lot of services, even major ones. Handing data over to authorities happens regularly too. Be careful if you are co-parenting or involves in financial disputes or get into trouble in future etc etc even if you cancel a service. Many websites etc do NOT delete your info when they give the impression they will. Storage is cheap & info is golden.

          Careful research is a bother & not convenient, but think about the risks & your priorities & liabilities at least a bit before deciding.

          PS - NOT associated with officeworks like ever, as a casual intermittent user accidentally checked the box automatically just before on a small phone screen thinking it was a routine T&Cs etc agree, & now ozb insisting I must work for them & WILL NOT let me uncheck it - as a former web developer can I say - usability fail!

      • It’s all good until your sata controller or faulty RAM slowly corrupts a whole bunch of files on a hard disk then those files get backup up.

        That said ECC RAM and ZFS can help protect you from this.

        If you encrypt the files before uploading to the cloud it mitigates the privacy risk.

        • +1

          I only write to the files to archive them, then I'm only reading from them if I need the data which is rare.

          I have 2 drives at home which are back-ups of 2 drives at the office, 1 drive is personal, the other is business. I store all my clients media on these drives and I explain why K do this and most appreciate the lengths I go to for privacy.

          Most clients also have their assets sent to them either physically on a thumb drive or electronically so they've got them stored again elsewhere. Lots of redundancy.

          I just can't have picture and video of my kids and grandkids etc. available to any hacker that wants to bother gaining access. A burger isn't going to bother to even steal my $10 used old heavy hard drives and of so, doubt he's (she's, let's me equal, both men and women can be mongrels) going to attempt to break encryption just to see my boring home videos.

          Anyway, I hope that helps with your two options and the pros and cons of each. I guess it all comes down to how secure and how much cost you'd like to budget for and how much data you have to keep on hand.

          • -1

            @[Deactivated]: Note - not OW employee - checked it accidentally & not allowed to immediately amend easy mistake.

            It isn’t just hackers. Cloud services providers WILL absolutely data mine your data including personal photos, places, faces, relationships etc & use it in a variety of ways linked to your identity that will follow you your whole life, commercial & legal. This generates so much revenue for them. This is not a controversial opinion. To avoid this, careful selection of cloud services that tout good privacy protection as a feature should be engaged in. Some jurisdictions are stronger than others, eg EU.

            High quality encryption first is a bloody good idea, as long as the keys are kept very safe.

            It’s a shame Australia has such poor upload speeds compared to, say, NZ (averages more than 3 times as fast). This is a market issue. We’re getting shunted by NBN providers on this.

  • +1

    I got the shuckable Seagate 5tb drives on Prime day for $154ish (UK stock).

    Really would have preferred locally but they've gone up in price in the last month so just bit the bullet.

    • +1

      What's the exact model of the ones you got?

      • Seagate Retail STKC5000404 One Touch Portable Hard Disk Drive, 5 TB, Space Grey $156.19 (usually $174)

    • Do you have a 2.5" NAS?

      • No just a new-ish Dell tower with 2x 2.5" drive bays and only 1 3.5" bay.

        Will get more 5tb drives later and put them in PCIe expanders.

        • Normal drives are the devil in a main PC, it's time for a NAS

          • +1

            @hamwhisperer: No thanks. I only need 1 HTPC that doubles as a backup file store for everything that goes up on google photos.

            I don't need anything that's on 24x7.

  • +1

    Got one of these around 6 months ago and it's now failed, i lost everything on it.

    • +2

      Should have backed it up. Hard drives fail.

      • -1

        First time in 25 years it's happened, i think these are just cheap garbage

        • That's called luck.

          • @Dvbargain: Long may it continue :) Normally i buy the enclosed HDD's that are more expensive but last much longer, the portable ones not so much

            • +1

              @sethman75: I do agree! Good luck! :)

            • @sethman75: What exactly is an enclosed HDD? Is that referring to a NAS? (Which I don't understand all that much) Just need for family pics etc. Got in the cloud but would like another backup. Thanks

  • +1

    WD is not reliable as it used to be. I have a 1TB WD passport that I could not recover any data.

    I think SSD might me much more stable

    • +1

      Hard drives generally fail over time. SSDs just stop working overnight. From looking at Blackblaze's hard drive reliability reports I have come to the conclusion that hard drive reliability is tied tohe individual model more than the brand. In saying that I have had numerous bad experiences with Seagate drives.

  • how could get price match ? via email

    • +1

      I did it through online chat at JB website.

  • +1

    My 2 WD of 2tb are probably 10years old and I never had any issues 🤷

    One is used as a NAS connected to my asus modem, the other one for transferring my ps3/ps4 games.

  • The older WD Element hdds were better quality. Not sure what's happened in recent times for there to be a sizeable failure rate (though last I read in 2020/21 it was the 4TB Elements SE hdd that had, had a lot of failures among the community).

  • If anyone has this drive or buys it can they please post a speed test using ATTO or similar? Thanks.

  • +1

    I have both Seagate and wd, from what I can see, Seagate is more reliable than wd cause my wd is dying with bad tracks.

  • The code doesn't work any more (expired) and the new 10% off doesn't work either but JB are still price matching (beating) the Officeworks price.

    I just ordered one for $144.90 ($29/T) via the online chat which was very simple.

    Also paid using a $100 JB gift card (which saved another $3).

    You just need to give them the JB SKU and the link to Officeworks when you ask for the PM.

    Worth checking stock availability first though - my local store didn't have any but told me they had 3 on order coming in - so just waited until the website showed they had some..

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