Guess what your cloud data is ultimately stored on. THAT'S RIGHT!

Nice price - ordered a couple from the Currys Ebay site as I fancied paypal and 2 weeks to pay it ... :sunglasses:

Anybody not getting home delivery options on the Currys site get on the ebay deal ...:smirk:

A couple of years ago, people said that about 2TB drives but nobody thinks twice about using those now.

Do these power down on idle? otherwise the lifespan could be severely shortened

​No its not, its 5TB - 5 terabyte (10¹² bytes) = 4.547473508865 terabyte

Yeah i know - but alot of those stories i found were over 3 years old. so i assume WD would hasve changed something by then.

anyone else with these new drives getting crazy high load count???

I guess it's only an issue if using in a server, which I won't. Horror stories of people racking up half a million load cycles in a few weeks.

I kept an eye on my Load Cycle and after 25 days of normal usage it is only at 346... its rated at 300,000 limit - so i'll only be clocking up ~5000 per year. Just keep an eye on your load count and see if its a problem for you.

Have you actually managed to run wdidle3 with an external drive? I've booted into dos on a usb stick but wdidle3 doesn't recognise my WD HD, even though it's connected via USB. I've scoured the internet and everyone says the HD has to be connected by sata. There's no way of running it with an external drive.

​Why would you lose anything if you have a backup? If you don't well that's your loss.

I just got one of these 5tb this morning (Sunday 29th) from pc world in Bury!

It is likely most will get green drives as they are being fazed out by WD and replaced with the new blue version. If you get red, then that's a bonus.

Could it be that the easy way to identify the colour of the drive within the caddy is from the 5TB sticker colour on the front of the packaging?....I have got 2 greens both with green 5TB stickers on the box......post/photo above from Azza1 has received 2 blues with black/blue looking 5TB sticker on the packaging........anyone else noticed this?......

I decided to keep the Blue drive as it was still fairly quiet (the normal clicks and grinding noises are louder than the green drives but not too bad). Happy to say that in my Fractal Design R5 case that has some sound dampening, I don't really hear the drive being accessed at all. Sounds no louder than the green drives when in my case.

I changed the head parking time from 8 seconds to 300 seconds using wdidle3. Also, I did my green drives while I was at it. All of them (mixture of 2TB, 3TB and 4TB) were all set to 8 seconds so changed them all to 300 seconds too.

I understand your point.

I dislike Seagate and like WD red and black, which is why I did not go for 5TB Seagate at the same price, and choose WD.

Now I received a faulty WD which need to return for refund. And both deals are gone.

How many people from here ended up buying these? There's a percentage of faults from any manufacturer.

It is making constant small noise and vibrations which is what I expect and nothing wrong with that.

The problem I have is that in additon to the normal noise, every 5 or 10 seconds it makes a louder sound like scratching on the wall, at the same time it shakes a lot harder. I do not consider this is normal.

All my 3 x 4TB Hitachi DX3, 3 x 4TB Seagate Expansion, 1 x 2TB WD only do normal noise and vibriation, not the scratching.

The scratching sound sounds like what people refer as "click of death". I am returning it, not taking my chances.

I am unhappy with WD, cannot believe its product straight out of box does that.

Are these suitable for a CCTV DVR?

My two arrived this morning. Both Blue - WD50EZRZ. Ran wdidle3 and disabled, one is in my NAS at the moment then I'll stick the other in once the parity check is done.

Cheers op ordered 2, there is talk that these maybe wd reds, I hope so and I hope I can remove the drives.

That sounds like the heads parking. I could hear mine doing it while they were still in the USB caddy. It didn't sound defective to my ears and obviously without hearing yours it's tough to tell if it's the same noise.

Despite the rubber bushings they are loud in the caddy. Whoosh, grind, whoosh, clunk, whoosh, grind constantly. Once cracked open and in a PC they are definitely quieter but I wouldn't call them silent. Putting a 7200rpm drive in the caddy gives some perspective though as that is even louder than the WD drives were.

When I received mine yesterday, open box, impressed with the look.

Connect to a computer, then realise it make a certain loud clicking noise every few or 10 seconds, and it shakes a lot. I can feel my table is shaking.

I think I have a bad one. I am going to return it.

I don't trust a drive which make that kind noise.

Has anyone experienced the same problem?

Mine's a blue which is a little frustrating as I wanted a green (I want to put it in a near-silent PC and apparently the greens are quieter). Will have to try to test the noise difference as I have other green drives. Would even consider sending it back if it's noisy as I don't really want to use it externally.

Bingo. Which is why the eggs in a basket analogy doesn't work with data. If I can have a copy of the eggs then it makes sense to just have them in the one basket rather than several baskets each multiplying the chance of a single failure.

I don't need redundancy for old episodes of Star Gate, not when realistically it's like a 4% chance of losing them.

My music library is on the home storage and a USB stick in my car, worse comes to the worse it's also up on Google Music though I'd want it all back in FLAC if something happened.

I've got maybe 30gb of irreplaceable data, and a combination of nested cloud storage and a back up external drive covers all that.

any item can fail. it can be 8gb or 10tb. they all can fail. i was always told your better having two 500gb over 1tb drive, or far smaller back in the day. but if one fails you still lose data sorry to tell you. thats why you back up. the size doesn't matter

​Maybe you should look at how you're handling them or where you're buying from. I haven't had a drive fail on me for at least 5 years now if not longer. I've had a 2tb, 1tb and 500gb drives in my microserver for 5+ years. Before that I was a field engineer fixing epos, PCs etc and the only drives that would fail were old ones, anything with new drives in lasted years and years and epos machines are switched on 24/7 usually with no power management so spinning all that time too.

You're either seriously unlucky, buy from dodgy shop, have dodgy couriers, turnover hundreds of drives a year or being ham fisted (no disrespect intended lol)

Got mine, its a Blue, manufactured date of Oct 2015 and from Malaysia.

I've popped it out of the case ready to go in my NAS server and have placed an old drive (1TB) into the empty case. Trouble is Windows is recognising it as a 5tb drive and not 1TB. Anyway of fixing this???

Yeah Windows will still spin it down if set to do so as it's a different mechanism.

Thanks. I hate to ask such a newbie question, but am I correct in thinking that if I did disable rather than extend the firmware timeout on the internal drives, I can still turn these drives off using energy management in windows, and by doing so windows would still safely park the drives? I will likely change the external 5TB to 300 seconds but if windows energy management can take control internally, I will disable the firmware timeout on the internal blues and let windows manage things.

Disable does actually disable

I got stung a few years ago and had a drive with 2.1 million parks in 12 months
has hardly moved since i disabled it

11/05/12
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 001 001 000 Old_age Always - 2146839
27/11/15
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 001 001 000 Old_age Always - 2148375
1536 Parks in 3.5 Years

Mine are both blue manufactured Oct 15, but interestingly one manufactured in Thailand and one in Malaysia. I don't know if it's still the case, but some years ago it was suggested the Thailand ones tended to be more problematic.

Anyway, checked both with wdidle and both were set to 8 secs for head parking, so adjusted to 300 secs with no issues.

Another Green here too dated 15th Aug 2015

Just been told
I received confirmation and a date for pick up on Tuesday .What a cow boy outfit .

Dear Customer,

We wanted to let you know that due to a technical issue on our website, the Western Digital ELEMENTS 5TB Hard Drive has been oversold . As a result of this issue, we will have had to cancel your order and process a refund for the full value of the product. You should expect to receive the refund within 3 to 5 working days.
We’re sorry for any inconvenience that this may cause
We hope to see you again soon.

Regards

The Currys & PC World Service Department

At least you got yours. I just got an email cancelling my order from pcworld/currys saying they've oversold due to a fault with their website :O

Both my drives arrived in there boxes wrapped in a bag delivered by royal mail, not exactly a confidence builder.

Does wdidle work on only wd drive cause I have a hgst and a few Toshiba drives that may or may not have the same head parking issue anyone with the experience on here advise?

Yep I could not even see the drive in disk management, box was damaged too hence why I think

Mine came DOA not being recognised at all with PC. Powers on with solid light, hearing clicking sounds after which nothing at all.

Green (WD50EZRX).

Looks like I got two green drives going by disc info EZRX running at 5700rpm, so I'm not sure if I'm more happy with the more silent faster greens or the slightly noisier & slower blues without the intelipower, but I have the greens so now to the drive check while in caddy then wdidle.

Should i be happy i got 2 blues not greens or reds wanted to use in a nas in raid 1, but thinking of putting one in my desktop and replicating to the NAS.

Just to advise open mine up and its a Blue WD Drive. 64Mb Cache and 5400RPM - Dated Oct 2015

For the people who don't own a desktop pc to install the hard drive and run wdidle. if you have a synology nas, you can put the drive on the nas and follow this link to tweak the head parking time or disable. http://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?f=124&t=82215
The post explains how you can telnet your nas and run terminal cmd to tweak the naughty wd drive.

I've read that unless you intend to use them in a NAS or 24/7 use it might be better to change 8 seconds to the maximum allowed e.g. 300 seconds.. hopefully I'll get round to this today..

Just to clarify, once I have formatted the 5TB external to be one partition, I can use wdidle3 on that USB drive from DOS without the need to remove it from its enclosure?

Thanks all.

Correct. Just be triple sure you're dealing with the correct drive! :smirk:

Also, as BigYoSpeck mentioned, it'll need to reformatted if you take it out of its case and install it as an internal drive and vice-versa.

Did anyone try to use WD Red smart load/unload utility to change the parking time on the WD blue drive? Will it work on the blue drive?

Just remember any data you put on the drive while it's attached to the USB won't be available once it's attached by SATA and also and data on an existing SATA drive won't be visible when it's attached by USB. Best way to do it is to have the 5tb drive installed in the system along with the old drive at the same time, copy accross your data, then attach the old drive to the USB controller which will then make you reformat it.

This is good to know. So you just go into administrative tools > computer management > disk management > delete all volumes > format as one volume > boot into wdidle on usb stick > disable head parking ?

Just converted the swapover, now to copy my 2Tb off the Green onto the 5Tb Blue and then I have a spare 2Tb long term backup.

Mine are Blue drives and they still park the head.

The drive is designed to last for years as an external drive, probably occasionally having big transfers made to it and when being accessed probably for media where it will be streamed constantly stopping the head parking taking place. I don't care about the minuscule power savings it makes so rather than it going through as many load cycles in a day as most drives do in their lifetime I'm disabling it rather than risking any detrimental wear.


Is it the same size as the green? if so I wouldn't bother I can't think of any benefit to swapping.

If it's larger capacity however then do you want more capacity? The green can always have the usb adapter attached and be placed in the Elements case. I've just popped an old 200gb Maxtor drive in. It makes you format it so make sure you've recovered everything off it before you do. Oh and getting it back in the chassis with the rubber bushings is a monumental pain.

I just picked one of these up as an impulse buy in Currys At Canary Wharf was told there was one more there which is reserved just for today
So if anyone is in the Canary Wharf area and you popping in just before closing you might be able to get one

Picked mine up at lunchtime, Costorphine Edinburgh. A few more waiting to be uplifted!

Empty box on shelf but no stock in there at all now. Gonna usurp a WD green 2Tb from my HP Proliant which currently has 2 WD Green 2Tb + 2 WD Red 3 Tb.

I think the biggest issue was with the 2TB green EARS drive, which seemed to suffer badly from aggressive head parking (going back a few years now). Not sure how bad it is with the newer drives. One would imagine with the 2015 drives being pictured here in the thread, it's less of a problem.

I managed to get my off in 6 load cycles
i must type quicker hehe

Received two blues wd from eBay store. The credit card method does not work well in my care and cut my right thumb twice. Finally opened up with a flat head screw driver.

Well just changed the head park timeout using WDIDLE3 with no issues at all on my 2x3TB RAID1 drives... Happy chappy.

If anyone else is planning on doing it... theres a universal boot cd with WDIDLE3 already built in so its even quicker to sort. Just write the iso to a USB using Rufus.

http://www.jzab.de/content/wdidle-bootcd

erm.. I can't find the wdidle utility? Where is it available for dl?

I've just popped an old 1TB Seagate into the vacant WD Elements case. Formatted it, and it's now working just fine plugged into my TV for recording live programs.

The only stupid question is the one you don't ask. I've answered your questions in order:

I have zero experience with Win7, but I suspect you can manage spin down for both internal mechanical drives and your new WD Elements through the OS. I'd certainly go down this route myself.

Personally, I had already disabled spin down on all my drives, and have just done the same to my new WD Elements (which is now just another internal drive).

The WD Elements was actually three partitions. As I understand it this was done for compatibility reasons. It formatted into one 4.45TB drive just fine on Win8.1

Good idea to go one by one. Rufus is good for creating bootable USB sticks.

Good luck! :smile:

Still available on eBay Currys store.... a few left... http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/WD-Elements-External-Hard-Drive-3-TB-USB-3-0-Automatic-Backup-Mains-Black-/111827170270?hash=item1a096b33de

One left on the shelf in Hartlepool store (near the marina) Hope this helps someone.

Ok I am going to tackle the parking wdidle thing today. Hope I don't cock it up!!! lol

I have an SSD and two WD 1TB blues in my system and the WDS Elements 5TB with a green inside..

Am I right in thinking that I can set suitable spin down times in the energy saving areas of windows 7?

If you were me would you disable spin down times on both the blues (internal) and green (external) and just let windows power these down instead?

When you say one simple volume, are you saying the WD Elements 5TB is two partitions? Am I right in thinking that they have done this to be compatible with WinXP?

To be safe I'll do it one drive at a time from DOS.. I guess I can just chuck the exe on a CD or USB stick... my motherboard is an Asus Z97 Pro..

Sorry for any daft questions. I'll review this thread and make sure I am armed with all the knowledge.

Yes it can. You have to go into Administrative Tools in control panel, make the whole thing one simple volume and then get busy with a boot disk to run wdidle3.exe

Hasn't expired, I just brought one home a few hours ago and there were more being reserved and some on the shelf.

hasnt expired, check online and had stock local which they didnt last night, reserved and went to store, SyncBack also voted for.

3 more in stock in MK

I'm pretty sure you need to be in dos only to run w3idle but you can specify the drive you wish to change (if you have multiple WD drives).

There are posts in this thread pointing to tutorials.

* You can query the idle state of each drive first to see what the values are.

One more vote for 2brightsparks SyncBack. Like the way it hash checks if you want it to be really sure.

Sorry if this sounds too newbie.

Can W3idle be run from windows and that only WD drives will be updated? My OS is on my Samsung SSD. Will I get confirmation that the change has been made? Is it best to just turn it off? I have two Blue 1TB drives also, should I turn them off? I'd rather windows turns my internal drives off not firmware...

Link now redirecting to Storage list page.
So guess Curry's have de-listed it.

JUST AN UPDATE GUYS, I HAVE BEEN TRYING TO GET ONE OF THESE AND AS WE ALL KNOW THEY ARE OUT OF STOCK EVERYWHERE.... BUTTTT GOOD NEWS THEY ONLY HOLD THE R&C FOR 24 HOURS SO STORES TODAY ARE SHOWING THEM IN STOCK AGAIN =D ...... GO CHECK !!!!!!

Just arrived! Mine is green! Booooo! I shone a torch through the grill to see...

Will the aggressive head-parking be an issue if I intend to use this drive for storage and watching movies?

Presumably the designers made the housing to resemble a book. If I look at the housing like a book, then the ventilation grills are the pages. When standing as it was designed to do so, the 'spine' of the book facing away from me and the pages (ventilation gaps) facing toward me, presumably the 4 clips are 2 per side in the pages facing toward me vertically. Presumably the 'sliding' bits you refer to are horizontal i.e. top and bottom? Correct? So just a case of prizing vertical sides and then sliding forward?

If you intended to keep this drive in its housing to use as an external drive would you personally turn off or change the intellipark feature? If so, which?

Thank you

I've always used the free version of SyncBack - it's absolutely brilliant. Have also installed the paid-for version at work, but the free one is fine for the home user. Get it here, just be careful to install the free one, don't click to install a demo of the paid-for one.

SyncBack Free does incremental backups (so it is smart enough to only copy over the new stuff since last time you backed up). It can also sync 2 disks, etc etc.

I wasnt being snide

Its trivial to open these with zero marks, zero damage and zero force

you just get a credit card inbetween the gap on the back and slide it around carefully
until the clips pop on the one side of the back, do the same on the other side of the back
dont touch the sides as there's zero clips and just sliders
once all 4 clips are popped just slide it open

I watched a few video's online of people opening them and omg
its like watching a chimp trying to open a wallnut with a brick

Am I missing something? :stuck_out_tongue:

So why not just post your alternative method without the snide remarks and help us all out.

* it's hardly butchery

I use a free MS Tool called SyncToy for that.

You create folder pairs and then decide how to sync them up when running the tool. There's no background service so it will only sync when you want to. You can also preview before the sync begins.

* although it only mentions windows 7 & XP I'm currently using it with 8.1 and I expect it's fine with 10 too.

I'm skint overdrawn what the hell how can I resist :smirk:

It amazes me the butchers you see on the internet :stuck_out_tongue:

Why not just pop the 4 clips with a credit card
then slide it open

Zero damage
Zero Marks
30 Sec Job
Warranty intact..

I've been using http://www.freefilesync.org/ to backup my drives. It takes a little setting up but it's worth it. I have it set to add all new content from source and delete all extra data from target (backup) drive so that every time I sync I get a matched pair and don't end up with duplicate files.

OOS :/

Carbon Copy Cloner is more useful for cloning entire drives than file backup (In my opinion)(good for cloning a C: Drive to a larger capacity drive when needed etc)
I use Cobain Backup for backing up files/folders as its free and has decent configurable options http://www.cobiansoft.com/cobianbackup.htm

A couple of decades ago i am sure you will recall people said that about the floppy drive, they said it wasnt stiff enuf but
nobody thinks twice about it now.

Windows has backup features built in under the control panel.

I was wondering if there would be a way to do a periodic sync, like once a week to back-up my photo collection. I've done a quick search and have come across 'carbon copy cloner' - does anyone have experience using this/related programs?

I found the easiet method was to hold the case between your legs and towards your body. Then take a flat headed screw driver as pictured below and push the edge towards you (you can generate a lot of controlled force this way). Do a bit on the bottom first (you'll hear a quiet click as it releases, just a mm or so at first) and then the top. When both top and bottom are released, repeat the process untils there's enough of the middle section showing to pull away with your fingers.

No clips broken and easy to reassemble. Even if you don't plan to use the drive in another device, turning off the 8s head parking is good for increasing the potential life span of the drive.

* if you somehow mess it up it's on you :P

Hi, I've just bought one of these as a back up drive to my 2tb portable WD drive and then would look to back up a further 2tb drive in the future when the first one becomes full. Could someone please explain the options that I have to do this, basically mirror the data on two seperate hard-drives onto this 5tb? Thanks!

None in Norfolk (East Of England), as of 2 mins ago.

COYS!

yours is rather cool too :smiley:

God damnit, just bought a 8TB and now I wanna get this as well! This website is gonna make me mental!

Tempted to replace my Buffalo 1TB with this baby

Anyone know if the WD greens need thier firmware hacking/changing? i hear various stories about idle parking being a problem on earlier drives, is this still the case?

Still a couple in stock for collection. These were the nearest ones I could find to Scotland :'D

Unit B Wakes Retail Park, River Way
Newport, PO30 5UZ

And one in
Unit 6 Houndstone Retail Park
Yeovil, BA22 8YQ

Ordered one for in-store pick up, thanks.

heat added, thanks. Just picked one up, plenty of storage for blu rays. Game of Thrones here I come.

Ordered a couple this morning. Will throw them in my NAS. :smiley:

Thanks OP. Ordered a couple for collection. Will be interesting to see if they are greens or blues :smiley:

For those who dont know. You may find that your drive will show as having two partitions. You will need to convert the drive from MBR to GPT before you can partition it as a single drive.

Yesterday it linked to the Currys/PC World site

Just cracked my 2 open and got a Blue and a Green lol

I like how some people are now referring to their personal porn stash as "family photos".

Clever! :man:

Bought myself 2 to upgrade my NAS from 2TB to 5TB with RAID. Heat added

Out of stock in most London shops

Got a blue with mine (manufactured in October 2015).

https://snapguide.com/guides/disassemble-a-wd-mybook-essential-hdd/
carefully pry the top and bottoms and you can de-shell it, there are no horrible hidden clips to deal with which is nice design for once.

can some one advice me looking to expand my Xbox One hdd is this the way to go or any recommendations?

I deleted a few hundred GB of porn recently.. and I made a deal with myself to not download any more.. there is such a thing as too much.

Got a Green one!



BTW - very easy to de-shell without any marks or damage. that way you can keep casing and box in-case of warranty issues

9TB of storage now. I think I have a problem :\

Sorry - after a bit of googling... i needed to right click on the whole disk and convert from MBR to a GPT drive to enable partitions over 2TB :smile:

Whats best between WD Green and WD Red then?

I'm guessing Red, Purple (24/7 CCTV I use and 1 Black never had a green?

the usb chipset uses some funky partition layout btw

there was 1x550gb partition and 2x2TB partitions on it when i fired my pc up without the enclosure

i removed all partitions zero filled about 10gb then initialised it as gpt

I reserved and for once they'd physically allocated the product to my reservation. All in-store stock gone (reserved probably thanks to this thread!). 945 left in warehouse, can't order online for home delivery but you can order it in store for delivery to store according to staff.

Eggs?

You'd have a backup plan obviously unless of course you're stupid. If you can't afford to lose it you have a backup plan or you lose it and cry and then you get told YOU SHOULD HAVE BACKED UP DOH!

Reserved at Currys. Went to Currys. Walked around looking at things including hard drives. Saw one of these, the last one. Picked it up. Went and paid. Didn't mention about my reservation. Guy went to counter next to me. Guy asked about his 5tb drive reservation and whilst smiling gave his number. Lady had none reserved in cupboards behind. Lady went to check the shelf. Lady came back and explained there was none left.

10/10 would reserve again.

Actually, it's an abbreviation for 'carry your own weight'.

Only 1 in my local stores, got last one. Would love another to RAID it so there's a backup if it fails.

Ignore the cpu stats on the green and the toshiba my power management limits benchmarks to around 180 read
so i ran prime in the background with a few threads going to ensure the benchmark was accurate
the blue's on a non intel controller that doesnt suffer with power management problems so i didnt need to do it on that

Awesome price per TB. Yes it's a lot of data to lose, but that's what backups are for. And for this price, assuming you can't afford to lose your data, then you can afford to buy two and RAID them. I paid just less than this for a single WD Red 4TB earlier in the year, so great deal. Heated.

Judging from Shonks stats it looks like it might be an ok drive for a HTPC. I'm guessing the lower spin speed will mean it'll run quieter (and cooler). The seek time between the Green and the Blue is minimal and CPU usage is low, so might fit the bill quite nicely. Must admit I was a bit miffed when I saw that they might all be Blue's inside the casing .Be interesting to see what people get. As you get them home and crack them open, add them to the thread. Be interesting to see what the spread is.

Cheers ... Yeah probably wise, will pull one out at a time and do it via my PC ... Just in case for some reason the array poops itself and I lose everything.

nope

Ive just run some benchmarks theyr pretty slow
these are just slower greens hope you get one thats been on the shelve for ages and has a green in it

5750 rpm Green 175.8 at the start 76.2 at the end
5400 rpm Blue 156.4 at the start 70.0 at the end
7200 rpm Toshiba 220.4 at the start 104.0 at the end (as a comparison)



Blue


Green


Toshiba as a Comparison

Could someone link a step-by-step guide to remove the firmware limitations?

This is why I just always buy two external drives and use rdiff-backup.

The advantage of that over using raid, is that it also gives you a file history, so you also recover any accidentally deleted files, or any old versions of files that have been edited, etc.

Thank you very much. Can you disable the parking time when the drive is in the enclosure?

most prob

Just snagged this deal for myself!
I've been waiting for a WD portable hard drive to go on sale somewhere :smile:

pick up one today it a Wd50ezrz inside.

Never knew about the WD Greens aggressively parking the head of the disk.. Ive got 2x3tb Greens. Good to see you can tweak it to a higher park time like the reds... I want to try it BUT, my HP Microserver is running the disks in Raid.

Can I do the tweak while there still in RAID, or do I need to drop them out of the array 1 at a time?
Hmm, guess im googling things for a while tonight.

Your welcome, after that I just put into my Synology (well, xpenology) and let that take care of the formatting etc.

Thanks a lot,mate

Remove from usb enclosure

fit in a pc
boot a dos usb boot stick with wdidle3 1.05 on it

wdidle3 (to see current settings)

wdidle3 /D to disable

mine has been dispatched

Quiet

This should help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2eYyRI_F98&list=WL&index=18 link to tool in the youtube description, burn this to CD.

I just checked the head parking its still 8.0 seconds on the blue's

Disabled now..

Fully expecting to to be shot down here, but can this be used with a PS4?

lol

With all the revelations by Snowden, quite why anyone wants to entrust their data to 'the cloud' (i.e. someone else's computer) is beyond me.. if a couple of kids can hack in to talk talk, it's only a matter of time before there is a big breach of a 'cloud'.

(Do some people actually believe cloud services are sort of in the clouds?)

Just ordered been looking for a 5TB for a while at a good price thank you !

Looks like the Blue are your bog standard desktop sort of a drive.

Not as exciting a deal as if a red or green were inside.

I think they still have the 8 second head park setting which you can change but no variable spin rate which should still be of benefit for long term reliability.

I use a lot of blu tack to silence components like hard drives.. either under an external drive or along the edge of internal ones where they areconnected to their cage(s).. the mass and springiness of blu tack helps deaden vibrations and noise..

Its a synonym for 'I'm a smart ass'.

that would be nice no more headache with head parking.

I just phoned WD and they said in the UK it is more likely a blue or green inside.... unlikely to be a red..

Still good. :smiley:

asking for advice I guess

I ordered the Seagate drive from Amazon a few days ago for £99.99 and it's been dispatched. Is it worth me ordering this and returning the Seagate drive when it arrives or is it not worth the hassle(and the P+P to return it)?

Dont store valuable stuff in a shed,police advise against it :-)

If you take this bad boy apart would it work in the ps4 (I'm expecting probably not...!)

They're merging product lines. I'm going to assume no more intellipower and just a fixed rpm of 5400.

On this... no
To have SSD it would need to be SSHD

The blue has some SSD on it as well doesn't it?

I hope mine is blue or red.. but I'll make do with green...

I missed out on it on EBAY so I got it from Currys/PC World website instead just now.. FREE next day delivery!

I sometimes deliberate too long on bargains but I figured even with Black Friday coming up this might still be one of the best deals on a 5TB drive...

Interesting to note that a 5TB green or red WD HDD costs more than the same drive in an external caddy!?

reposted again with link to currys site

link

Why's this expired? You can get it online and in-store still.

yep you can still get it online just did

The drive itself will be under a warrenty

States oos . just missed as tried buying but had to reset eBay password!

Anyone recommend a decent NAS Enclosure for a pair of these disks ?
(once removed from their cases)

No it is not risky , buy if you paired them, may be 2 different brands so not all eggs are in one basket. You need to use two baskets.

Paypal invoices you two weeks later, rather than debiting from your account at point of sale.

Anyone looking for a take apart guide search
wd mybook essential its the same shell

Anyone recommend a good external hard drive testing tool? I use h2testw for pendrives, not sure on something this size

What do you mean 2 weeks to pay for it?

Anyone found a deshelling guide?

bought this when it was £119 about 6 months ago

Done and done cheers :smiley:

You can still keep the smaller 1 and copy the really important stuff on it. Thats what ive been doing for many years.

I wouldn't bold text containing so much stupid.

Picked one up instore

Great timing, just got a 10% off voucher for ebay (£100 min spend), so got this and something else I was considering for just over £10 and almost got the extra for free :-)

I assume the voucher is once only, customer specific but you are welcome to try SUKELECBQFJDW

Is 5TB enough to store all my porn? I do wonder, as I have been in quite a few.

There isnt any drive thats portable that you cant take the hard drive out of the case. They are all standard hdd inside with sata connections

I am having to use the WDIDLE3 tool to resolve the frequent head parking on my recently bought 6TB WD Green drive. Even though it has only been in my PC for a month or so it has more Load Cycle Counts than the 2TB one that I used the same utility on over two years ago.
I have previously done the same on each of my WD Greens but sort of hoped that it might not be needed on the later / newer models.

Off I go.....

Heat added as this is a good buy OP.

I honestly don't know, but I will find out tomorrow when mine arrives and report back.

There are other WD idle speed tools out there too - have a google.

One thing I must say though: Check your model numbers, and read everything twice before attempting anything mentioned in this thread. I've successfully reconfigured a 3Tb Green in the past and it was a piece of cake. Do be careful though, and I'd advise against modifying firmware on any drive that has anything stored on it that you don't mind losing.

To previous posters, the Reds and Greens are the same. It's just branding and some firmware differences. There is no physical difference. Much like how Intel differentiates their CPUs by blowing a few fuses to disable certain features.

I want to know this also....

Excellent deal; heat added; item ordered.

Succinct blog post regarding WD Greens and Reds.

WD Idle 3 Software from Western Digital

So does intellipower negatively affect lifetime when used as an external drive?

The Greens are configured the way they are to minimise energy use in the average desktop (OS drive) setup. Reds are configured not to park the heads as in NAS / Server setups there is so much activity, by the time the heads have parked they'll be brought back into use for the next activity. The Greens (and any other drive not designed for this type of usage) literally just wear themselves out mechanically after a while.

So, to answer your question: Doing this to your internal Green OS drive will cause no harm, but you will see slightly higher energy usage.

​mine went from a WD drive to a Seagate pipeline drive and works flawlessly, as long as you are running the latest firmware it should work, as long as you reflash the firmware with the replacement drive pre-installed into the case

If it is a green drive inside the caddy, and you wish to use the drive as an external drive i.e. you are NOT seeking to dismantle the unit to get at the drives inside to use in raid, would intellipower have a negative effect on lifecycle of the drive when used as an external drive?

If yes, is it possible to disable intellipower whilst it is still in the caddy or do you have to remove it from the caddy in order to use WD's utility to disable the inellipower feature?

I hope my question makes sense.

I bought a 4TB version of this, removed the 4TB drive (Green) for my PC and then tried to replace it with a WD Green 2TB drive but it no worky. Tried several other drives but couldn't get it to work.
Just saying

Am I right in assuming that this won't work with a ps4?

So your data storage strategy, is being prepared to lose no more than 1TB of data?

Hi
Is this drive compatible with windows 10.
Just want to keep the family pictures safe .
Thanks

Ordered 2 for home delivery.

And I don't fancy Cloud Storage. I have about a terabyte of photos I'd need to upload, and I don't fancy them all being hackable, or subject to loss due to massive failure of a company going bust. Nope.

Haha, just saying if you value your privacy it's better to keep stuff in your own possession.

Voted hot...but i got it for 82.99 in august when bespoke was alive.

You obviously have more interesting family pictures than me :-)

Amazing price. Hot, hot, hot.

does anyone know if this will work on a Panasonic TV to store films etc on?

Safer in a sense that you will be able to retrieve them, but there's a bigger chance that they will accidentally end up in the public domain. Also Google takes ownership of anything you store on their servers, so if they ever have an idea to somehow use your photos for whatever reason you will have already agreed to it... The cloud also gets hacked all the time, that's how we get to see celebrities naked :stuck_out_tongue:

if purchased on ebay can it be returned to the store

Any one can 100% that this works on Xbox one please?

What write speed is this 5200rpm or 7200rpm???

Ordered 5 via TCB and was offered free del and selection of del dates. Heat

Great price! Plan to purchase £80 of gift cards at Morrisons for Fuel Saver voucher and 5% TSB cashback.. hopefully the stock level is accurate for my local store!

Scorching hot deal sooooo tempted, trying to resist

Definitely works with the Xbox One as I use one myself that I bought from Currys a month ago grrrrr

For backup purposes you're generally better with an external. Plug it in, run the backup, unplug it and short of fire or it getting dropped you're data is safe.

Raid + backup + cloud backup is the way to go for anything you totally can't loose.

At that price buy 2 and you can backup :stuck_out_tongue:

ordered

same price too

if your local Curry's haven't got these in stock eBay has them from Curry's as my local Curry's didn't have them in stock :smiley:

The only problem I have with these are that they sometimes lock up when transferring huge amounts of data at once. Sometimes this can even cause system instability and require a reboot. Someone on here once said that's more a problem with externals in general than with any specific drive tho...

I have the 3tb model... Considering this... Heat added! :smile:

Nothing else like a HDD deal to set your imagination free.

Nice avatar :smile:

Picked mine up earlier, hasn't failed yet.

Thanks. Ordered 4 on ebay!

A big basket of eggs.. Cheap though :smiley: heat

Is there a way to check if it has a Green drive or Red drive inside without opening it up?

Hot damn this is cheap! Do I really need another HDD? Of course I do! Thanks OP.

Got on ebay also, thanks.

So they do! For some reason I'd searched quickly and thought it was only one year - but even according to their specs, it's 2 years. Even better - cheaper and double the warranty! :smile:

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/AAG/ENG/4178-705859.pdf

ordered 2 from ebay store. save 80 quid :smiley:

I heard that if you type lmgtfy into lmgtfy, you might break the internet

I think I may have just found my new Xbox One HDD, thanks. :smiley:

Nice one.

Great price, I paid that for the 3tb version about 6 months ago. Perfect to use along with your Xbox One, you shouldn't need to get any more storage for the life of the console, HOT!

Bravo!

Thanks, ordered via Fleabay and cancelled the 5TB Seagate from Amazon - I figure either one will do, they both have only 1 year of warranty, and this is only for a third backup that I'll take offsite... Paranoia much? :neutral_face:

Brilliant, thank you!

thanks, ordered from ebay for delivery.

hot.

Thanks, cant resist a big hard drive, ordered from ebay.

what's lmgtfy? can't be bovvered to search ..lol..

So buy two and back one to the other (buy two different makes/models) problem solved well unless your house burns down but in that case I think 5TB of data will be the last of your worries!!

Cloud storage is the present and the future.

I have been brainwashed into being a good consumer, im really tempted to get one despite my pc having 3tb free space on it.

More like your ignorance was showing. Hard drive capacity is always labelled in decimal.

I'm so tempted, down to my last 1Tb on a 4Tb raid 1. I really cant decide :\

got two, thanks

Great price. Reliable brand. Heat added.

The bare drive itself is probably designated as OEM with no separate warranty. The manufacturer will have recorded the serial no. of the bare drive as having been supplied as part of an external drive, and would only provide a warranty for the complete product (i.e. encased drive and PSU).

That's a lot of porn

Yeah cheers for the heads up didn't think to look on ebay. The lack of delivery was my only bug bear.

Was about to buy this, but can somebody please explain this whole green/red thing to me please? Thanks"

Nice price - ordered a couple from the Currys Ebay site as I fancied paypal and 2 weeks to pay it ... :sunglasses:

Anybody not getting home delivery options on the Currys site get on the ebay deal ...:smirk:

These are £141.00 on Amazon!

Green is low energy consumption and I guess a slower rpm? Red are suitable for NAS - as these are pretty large drives the assumption is that most people want them for storage, so red is more useful.

nope, just thought typing "Just a Bunch Of Delicous-eggs" or JBOD would to obvious... obviously not.

Can't see how you void the actual drives warranty, you haven't opened the actual drive. Warranty on the caddy will be void. Would be a strange one for them not to let you claim for a failed drive if it occurred.

...somebody missed the point ....lol

nope, just a bunch of eggs!

Same here don't need a new drive, I have a 3tb with everything on it. Plex and all. But it's a few years old now and still is good. Wd for you. I have one tb still empty. So I don't need a new drive lol

I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive. I do not need another hard drive.............

Time was 5gb wasn't a small amount of data. It's just an amount of data which is a pain to lose no matter how much. Hard drives fail, it happens. Sensible data management is your best defence. I'm not going to keep the only copy of baby pictures on this and cross my fingers. That stuff gets kept on my pc internal storage drive, a smaller than this external drive and in the cloud.

A film/tv library though it's just easier to plonk on one big drive. Having multiple drives means multiple chances of failure. If you have that much data to store you have that much data to store, no point in worrying about redundancy and backsups of stuff that you can always re-download and that you probably have a friend who's library you can leach again in the event of a failure.

some people just worry, life is too short lol. back up and twice and don't worry

Ty 2 reserved :-)

I intend using it with my Xbox One so its not going to be irreplaceable.

WTF ...i say it from experience......had too many new large drives fail over the years as the manufacturers haven't ironed out the bugs yet.

Once i see failure rate then i'll consider buying !

Between Google Drive/Photos/Music, Onedrive and Dropbox most people can keep everything irreplaceable in the cloud.

I suspect most people use for these will be massive libraries of downloaded linux iso's which push comes to shove you can always get again.

Anyone who has the potential of 5TB of data that is critical probably isn't going to use a consumer grade external hard drive.

Good price, good drive. Pain that delivery isn't available and my nearest store was already out of stock. Stuck a reservation in at the next nearest so I'll see if anything better pops up before tomorrow.

Are the green and red drives not the same except for the firmware?

EH ? What difference will that make ? ...it takes 9.5hrs to full format this drive !

​It was only a matter of time before some comes out with the old "this drive is too big (don't trust it), I might loose my entire cat video collection". You could say this for any storage product. It's like saying "you should stay clear of using large amounts of NON-ECC RAM, because there is a higher likelihood of cosmic rays causing a bit to flip and corrupting a file being written to the hard drive". I agree not all hard drives are equal in reliability but claiming size as the determining factor is a little bit silly.

9.5hrs? upgrade your machine

Green... :disappointed: WD Red's FTW! :sunglasses:

Nice. Reserved one for the Xbox One. Can then download and store ALL my games as well as my Backward Compatible titles and have plenty of space to spare :smiley:

Thanks. Reserved. Currys were OOS but the local PC World have one. At the moment I have a 1GB external drive and a 2GB external drive - both of which are full and neither of which are backed up :confused:

Brill

Stunning value thanks OP. Reserved one and almost went for two but that's getting silly

nice price

isnt it refreshing, hdd's at good prices....long may these storage prices fall!

......Looks like the grammar police are online tonight ...ROFL !! .... i think you'll find most intellectuals on here knew exactly what i was talking about....LOL

How would this rate for an Xbox One external drive?

Correct, not the 4.5TB you said previously.

No i'm not .........this drive formatted is 4.5TiB !

Anybody had any dealings with the WD MY CLOUD,if so are they any good ?

You're confusing TB & TiB.
It's precisely 5TB. 5 Trillion bytes.

OOS near me :disappointed:

Is that a RAID 5 OR RAID 10 egg basket?

I just collected a couple from store, got 2x Blue

"Blessed is the Pessimist as he hath made the backup"

These big drives are fine as long as you are prepared to lose one with a catastrophic failure. I'd want a full local backup of everything on the drive plus a cloud/off-site copy of the most important data. A season of Breaking Bad is replaceable. Family photos aren't.

You'd have to be pretty naive to store all your important stuff on one external HDD.

You need more eggs, and maybe some where to backup your eggs. (oh, 5tb scarry!)

Cheers for the heads-up OP. Ordered.

Will be well chuffed if it comes with a WD Red.

Great for a back up of the back up

That's what backups are for.

Really ?....... I don't own any drives over 1TB now .......lost too much data over the years.

A couple of years ago, people said that about 2TB drives but nobody thinks twice about using those now.

Couldn't help myself, ordered another :smiley:

Cracking price! Must be the best price currently on for a 5tb external drive?

And WD too! Just in time to replace my aging 1.5tb Samsung which is nearly full :smile:

Heat OP!

Thanks OP, ordered me one for collection.

Bargain of a drive

A WD50EZRX green drive delivered for £90 - awesome!
And an ordering/delivery website that works properly and recognises addresses - bonus (yes, looking at you Tesco online)
Thanks gooner, Hot as ...

pretty much :smiley:

So luck of the draw by the looks of it (some are red some green) which means ye we will get greens :smirk:

are these the mybooks ? they look exact but didnt see mybook in title. just checking incase they dropped the word mybook for it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5Epy5Ugj7k - This guy got a Green drive, I'm guessing they will all be the same?

U.S thread started in april guys opened them up here have a read https://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=39200.0

It's them voices again

TCB 1.05% I think.

1 orderd for home delivery cheers op! (restrained from buying 2...just lol

Super price and love WD drives. Have some more heat! :sunglasses:

Ordered - cheers OP :smiley:

Grab it now, if it drops in price within 7 days you can get the difference refunded.

http://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/price-promise-1023-theme.html

Will there be cheaper black friday... no idea, at this price it may be worth just grabbing now I think.

have some heat

Can this one be opened up and the drive taken out of is it soldered on.

£18 a TB :confused:

Just not a fan of such a huge single drive, heat added though for the price


Previous models all have removable drives don't see this being any different

Can the HD be taken out or used as a sata drive or is the USB interface part of the drive ?

cool, good price.. heat