Looks like a good way to get some cheap 8TB Reds.

Red are for always on NAS (5900rpm) with a 3 year warranty.

Red Pro are faster Red's (7200rpm) with a 5 year warranty.

Blue are for general desktop storage (5400rpm).

Green are more energy efficient drives for desktop storage with more aggressive head parking (5400rpm I believe).

Black are performance orientated desktop drives (7200rpm) with 5 year warranty.
Purple are tuned for surveillance systems that need to record multiple video streams simultaneously.

Yellow are raid orientated drives.

That's all I know off hand but I'm sure there's more colours :stuck_out_tongue:

They will work like any other drive if removed from the enclosure (would need a format etc). But if you have stored data on them prior to removal, you wont be able to access the data because it's encrypted.

Looks like a good way to get some cheap 8TB Reds.

There's reds in them beds... :sunglasses:

Are these the hardware encrypted drives as one of the Amazon reviewers mentions though?

Is this suitable to run Plex?

Got this a few months back for what I remember was a few quid cheaper, but still a great price. Removed the drives to use elsewhere.

One thing to note if you're intending on using this as is: There is a lot of discussion around the encryption on the unit and what happens if the actual case fails but the drives are ok. Seems you will also lose access to any data because there doesn't seem to be a way to retrieve the encrypted data without the actual case. You cant just pop the drives into a PC, so best to have a back up of whatever is on them. Not too sure if dropping the drive into a new case (same model case) would help.

I hate companies using this tactic of encrypted hard drives to stop you just strip it down after the warranty expires

I got 6 enclosures (12 drives) when WD briefly had them in stock stacking multiple codes to get me £377

http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/western-digital-book-duo-16tb-430-possible-further-10-off-10-off-377-wd-online-store-2494709

Can't fault amazon's service and WD so rarely have these in stock

Sold 5 of the empty enclosures for £30-40 on eBay

Hi can i take out the 2 8tb reds and drop them in my 4 bay qnap then put the 2 x 3tb reds i have spare from that into this ??

thanks

16TB :confused:

I'm interested to know. Are these drives useless outside their enclosure?

If they're gpt formatted internally (which they must be to be recognised as over 2 terrabytes) then they'll be in Linux format (because the Nas program will be running Linux) then maybe they'll be running an encrypted version of a Linux format) On top of that, they may be mirrored OR striped, if the latter then that may be specific to the hard disk controllers on the NAS box. So even without intentional encryption, then recovery to the data will be a real pain in the ar*e :disappointed: and I for one would never contemplate using this NAS!
The only good thing about this NAS seems to be the hard drives are easy to remove to use in something else!

(sigh) ordered.

Here's the reasoning i had to use to convince myself. I'll sell my warranty replacement recertified 5TB NASWare drives along with a warranty replacement 8TB Archive SMR drive and replace them with these nice new 8TB drives.

Plus I'll have the enclosure to hook up to my networked media server which can hold a couple of spare (questionable health) drives I've got. Make use of them as a mirrored RAID networked backup.
Actually it'll probably end up hooked to the xbox.

You can do that. I'll be taking the drives out and using smaller Seagate drives inside it :wink:

Ordered, thanks

you made a good argument , Ordered, thanks

Great price.

The only difference between the Reds in these and standalone Reds is that these come with a 2-year warranty, rather than the 3-years you'd get from buying the drives separately (and in the more advanced enclosures).

http://support.wdc.com/warranty/warrantypolicy.aspx?lang=en#group2

Are there any iterations of the WD Reds over the years?
If I buy this, would the revisions be older than the ones bought direct from WD?

Can some explain to me.. What these colours mean... Red drives green blue etc... I have no idea??

Quick question, genuinely interested rather than being sarcastic, why would someone need 16TB?

And, if it's of an industry where data storage is that important, wouldn't they want to be spending more money on a far more secure solution?

1:1 Bluray Rips (30-50GB a disc)
FLAC Music Files
Family Photos

Basically anything digital from my life since I was 12 years old (some 24 years ago).

I think 11 x 8TB Drives able to take 3 failures with a cold spare on standby is pretty secure for home data.

in for 1, thanks

I think you probably get some sort of free cloud backup with this Nas which might actually be useful if the drives weren't so big, but funnily IIRC, according to users it doesn't actually work

Looks like a Zippo lighter :smiley:

Worth mentioning the RED's inside these are 2 year warranty ones.

right ...can anyone explain me how (to what purpouse) are these used???

Okay. I wanted this as the Plex server, so I wouldn't have to have a PC switched on to access the Plex database on iPad etc. I know some of these network hard drives are able to do that type of thing. Guess this isn't one of them then. Thanks :smiley:

I would think very hard and do your homework on this matter. There is hardware encryption on the drives that is accessed from the unit. One of the reviews suggests this cannot be disabled...

"1.0 out of 5 starsWhat Western Digital isn't telling you: Very bad design flaw that will threaten your data. AVOID THE WD MY BOOK DUO.
By A buyer on 29 July 2015
Size: 4 TBStyle: 2-Bay Verified Purchase
I bought this intending to use it in RAID 1 mode to get extra protection against a disk failure. It should be obvious to Western Digital that the provision of RAID 1 would mean that it would be bought by users wanting to make loss of data due to failure of a single disk less likely. (And yes, I know RAID 1 doesn't guarantee safety and that a further backup is advisable. That's not the point - the point is that anyone buying it to use in RAID 1 mode would clearly be expecting significantly more safety than would be provided by a standard external hard drive from some other manufacture without RAID 1. However, due to action taken by Western Digital, this is not the case, and it would be impossible for Western Digital not to know this.

The drives are hardware encrypted. You cannot turn this encryption off. There is a password option, but even if you do not use this, the drives are still always encrypted. The electronics that do the encryption are built into the enclosure. The encryption/decryption key is built into a chip in the enclosure. The user has no access to this key."

I wish people would learn to read, these have "Password Activated Encryption" that means if you don't set a password then there is no encryption, much like other drives that support encryption.

Drives are formated in NTFS, they support RAID 0 (default) RAID 1 and JBOD.

Its all on their product page in black and white.

https://www.wdc.com/products/external-storage/my-book-duo.html

WD SmartWare Pro.

You can get a 8TB 1bay for £214.99 if you only want one drive.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01BBZ4Q0C

Same price at Maplin http://www.maplin.co.uk/p/wd-8tb-my-book-usb-30-external-desktop-hard-drive-a56ut

Reading some of the reviews and posts on the WD forums, encryption is ON irrespective of setting a password. The password is for not letting someone else gain access to your data, for example if you share the PC with someone else. The problem seems to be, that if the case/controller fails, then you cant gain access to the data, even if you remove the drive and even if you haven't set a password. The reason seems to be that the 'key' is unique to each case/drive and even trying the bare drive in an 'identical' case wont allow access to the data. That's my understanding from what some are complaining about.

https://community.wd.com/t/wd-my-book-duo-data-forever-lost-if-drive-enclosure-dies/6496

Price has dropped by 7 pence... Every penny counts and all lol

Doesn't contain the red drive which is why the OP is such a cracking deal.

Those posts on thier forum are from 2015, I would be surprised if this is still the case, certainly contradicts what they state on their site and needs clarifying.

https://community.wd.com/t/wd-my-book-duo-data-forever-lost-if-drive-enclosure-dies/6496/27

Last post there is from Jan 29th 2017. Could just be someone replying to an older post, but I purchased one of these in mid 2016 (just to remove the drives) and didn't test the theory unfortunately but someone on that forum did test it in August 2016 and it held true.

Yeah I just noticed, looking at the manual it looks like it doesn't encrypt when using JBOD, but who knows.

Certainly out of order if they always encrypt, very misleading info on their site.

THIS DEAL IS SO HOT.

This 16TB is constantly out of stock.

These are pain to get PLEX running, you might be able to by modding, but simple answer is no
http://support.wdc.com/knowledgebase/answer.aspx?ID=12949 not on the supported list at the moment

no i mean what the free online storage is with this as put in the comment above mine

Indeed this basically makes raid 1 near pointless...

So hot! the disks alone are c£300 each

Just ordered 4 so I can finally fill the Synology DS1815 I bought 9 months ago on offer. This will be for the ultimate Plex setup I've been building towards! Overkill, yes but I am a hoarder of media!

Seems pointless having these as backups when you have to back these up as well in case the case develops a fault.

Would this work connected to an existing MyCloud device?

LOL no. Although you could use it store media.

I think it was originally free software which you were given with wd Nases and external USB drives which enabled you to back it up to a cloud, now it seems this is only available to cloud enabled versions of their NASes

Finally enough storage for my extensive Busty Asian filmography collection.

Cracking price. Heat.

Right up,to,the point the 1815 fails because the c2538 chipset is one intel announced this week is faulty.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/07/intel_atom_failures_go_back_18_months/
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/244074-intel-atom-c2000-bug-killing-products-multiple-manufacturers
https://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?t=127839

:confused: Amazing. Hats off to you sir.

Great deal, saw it mentioned on the Datahoarder subreddit. I'd probably look to swap 'em out with smaller drives and use in a different enclosure.

Edit - how's temps with these units? I see they are fanless.

Why do i need 16tb, why is £424 cheap for this?

Games nowaday are becoming higher and higher

GTA V is like 80gb,

That's a lot of data to lose

Find me 2x 8TB Red drives for less.


This comment always crops up and never makes any sense if you actually think about it.

Excellent price, a crazy amount of storage, but you can never have enough.

As someone who does have a use for this amount of storage, can someone explain the technical reasons why this is preferable to having a bunch of portable HDDs lying around? When portables are on sale you can find £25/TB which is less than this deal so what makes this so special? Not trying to be funny, genuinely intrigued.

Should I buy this item or keep the WD My cloud EX4 12TB 4-BAY I purchased from the WD Outlet for £339?

Are there any differences in terms of Hard drive encryption (as discussed on this thread) etc between these 2 NAS enclosures?

Many Thanks

A 100KB file is a lot of data to lose, if it contains the cure for cancer...

Thank you for answering your own question.

Irrespective of which route you take, if you back up, then it's whatever works for you. Personally having the least amount of drives possible suits me better. For example if I need 8TB of storage, then 2 or 3 of these (8TB) drives would be sufficient for me. Or if I like hunting around for the drive with the correct data, I could buy 4 (or 6) x 4TB drives.

I generally work around Murphys Law, "If anything can go wrong, it will". The only time I have lost data is when I didn't have a backup. Since putting into place a simple backup routine, I have never lost any data.

In my case I have a collection of things which I want to be accessible together over the network. If you use a computer or dedicated NAS box, physically your restricted to the amount of space within the box, so maybe you can get six or eight disks in there. So your storage is half this as you need a copy. At the moment using 4 terrabyte disks, this only gives a storage space of 12 or 16 terrabytes. This may sound a lot but at the moment I have two machines with 12 and I'm well into the second one? So doubling this capacity seems attractive!

This one is not actually a NAS, it's a DAS (Directly Attached Storage) since there's actually no ethernet port. If you want a NAS, I'd keep what you have.

If you're buying this, you're better off buying simply for the 2x 8tb Red HDDs in it, as these are around £300 each usually, and taking a hit on the slightly shorter warranty. But I would imagine the 12tb in your NAS above is made up of 4x 3tb HDDs, so replacing two of the 3tbs with 2x 8tbs would actually drop your capacity using RAID down to 6-9tb with a lot of unusable space. So either go large with 4x 8tb, or leave it as it is.

So just to clarify, I take it that if you take both the 8TB disks from the enclosure, the warranty will be voided? If one or both of the disks then fail, you would have to put them back in the enclosure to get the warranty back?

This is a really good deal on the HDDs and it's a cheap way to add them to my Drivepool!

if you take the hdd out, are they still covered by warranty as a standalone drive??

No, you can claim warranty on the individual disks as they're designed to be user-replaceable.

Yes, as above.

Yes... basically I buy the Red's for the warranty and NAS/server grade recommendation and I was curious how the warranty works.

Thanks a lot. I think I may buy this then!

As mentioned several times here, note that these have 2 year warranties rather than the 3 years you get from buying standalone (see my post #23).

Thanks again. I read through the thread and picked up on the 2yr warranty and I am happy with the trade-off especially when you factor in the cost. These drives are also better than the equivalent alternatives.

Thanks for thw tip. Bought for £380 on Amazon Warehouse :smiley:

Are the drives inside definitely WD80EFZX ?

I know but why is it so much, its probably cheap for 16tb red why is it so much? Its pricey for harddrives when Most pcs dont have £420 worth of Hardware (many may have a £420+ PC but not its not worth, the parts are less)

It's not expensive though. It works out at 2p per gigabyte, which is really very cheap.

Just received this drive. Lovely bit of kit, fast, quiet and does indeed contain two WD Red drives, which I was a little wary of with mine being an Amazon Warehouse order.

That is ridiculous, seems to be a time bomb waiting to happen (again!)

Thanks killer :smile:

Well my order of 4 arrived today, 8 x WD80EFZX easily removed from the enclosures and safely installed in my Synology DS1815+. Sad to see the articles posted about the CPU failing but I'll just have to wait and see! Got 42TB usable space now with 2 drives for redundancy (SHR-2). Copying across my media now.

Cheers OP I ordered 2 so thanks for the heads up :smiley:

Some of the more NAS/Enterprise orientated drives will have features in the firmware like TLER (Time limited error recovery) where the drive will give up trying to read/re-allocate a bad sector quicker than a non TLER drive.

This can be important in some RAID setups as the controller will drop the drive out the array totally if it takes to long to respond (I.e you don't really want an entire drive to drop out due to a few bad sectors esp if it's during a rebuild/sync)

Those people who have PC's not worth £500 are hardly going to buy a hard drive of this capacity/expense. They'll be happy with the basic/standard 1TB/2TB drive that will hold all their family photos/videos/music/schoolwork and whatnot.

These drives are only going to be really used in a NAS by users who most likely have dedicated hardware/machines to house them.

Eg. I've got my desktop for gaming/general use and a totally separate pc/media server which houses 33TB across a handful of drives. This machine is exclusively used to run plex 24/7 and nothing else.

Price wise this is very good for the drives you're getting which retail for a good deal more.
WD Red's also command a premium over 'normal' drives which makes this especially good.

I use mine for Plex. 65% full. Wind your neck in.

and my laptops worth £100

One drive is riddled with bad sectors. Scan them properly!

Oh no. What tool do you use for scanning?

HD sentinel pro. Has found a lot more than other scanners. £18 with a code or $17 if you manage to use a VPN and give a US billing address. Well worth the money.

Thanks for the tip, I'll check it out.