Two 8TB WD Red drives for $500 shipped at Amazon

[Superorb]

Amazon has the WD My Book Duo 16TB external setup for $500 shipped. These have two 8TB WD Red drives in them, and the warranty still applies after the drives are removed from the enclosure (Update: this isn't true, as mine are marked OEM when a friend's 6 drives all have their own warranty) as you can use the drive's SN to check warranty on WD.com. That's $250 for a WD Red 8TB drive that's normally $330+ right now. That is a deal if I've ever seen one.

 

https://www.amazon.com/16TB-Desktop-External-Drive-WDBLWE0160JCH-NESN/dp/B01B6BN1CU

[Hoopster]

I don't know if this is still the case, but about 18 months ago there was a discussion in the WD forums that WD had enforced encryption on the drives in the duo enclosures that rendered the disks useless outside of the enclosure. This encryption cannot be disabled and the drives can only be read from within the enclosure.  According to the discussion this was done to prevent harvesting drives at a cheaper price from the duo enclosures.

 

Again, I do not know if this is still (or ever was) true, but it came from WD forums.

[c3]

I don't know if this is still the case, but about 18 months ago there was a discussion in the WD forums that WD had enforced encryption on the drives in the duo enclosures that rendered the disks useless outide of the enclosure. This encryption cannot be disabled and the drives can only be read from within the enclosure.  According to the discussion this was done to prevent harvesting drives at a cheaper price from the duo enclosures.

 

Again, I not know if this is still (or ever was) true, but it came from WD forums.

 

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

 

It's even worse than you think.

[garycase]

Hope not too many folks took advantage of this "deal" -- getting a pair of 8TB WD Reds for $250 is indeed a very good buy ... but NOT if they are useless for the intended purpose 

 

... and from the link c3 posted, I wouldn't even want them in the MyBook Duo => losing all your data from good drives because of an electronics failure would be a rather disappointing event (to put it mildly).

 

[mr-hexen]

I dunno how accurate that is. The thread talked a lot about people trying to get these working in windows and that Disk Mgmt only recognized the drive but there's not driver letter!

 

I'm not sure they realize the drive is probably not in a format that windows reads natively as the WD host OS is probably Linux based.

 

But let's say the drive worked fine and yup was encrypted therefore unreadable.... i'm not sure how a drive cannot be wiped and then not re-used... wouldnt the drive itself have to have the encryption logic like some enterprise SSD's ?

[Superorb]

I received mine last week. The individual drives do not have a warranty, only the enclosure. WD says if a drive fails they need the enclosure SN and drive SN and they will replace. I will test today to see if drive can be read outside the enclosure. I suspect that it is just a regular, standard WD 8TB helium filled drive. Someone else I know got 2 from different vendors and all his 6 drives each have their own 2 year warranty which is different from mine marked as OEM.

[garycase]

Most modern drives support ATA-Secure, although this is generally disabled by default.

 

But if it's enabled, it can be very difficult to unlock and disable without the appropriate password.  So IF WD has enabled this and embedded the password logic in the controller for the external box, then this could in fact be a problem.

 

I do not know if that's the case -- I don't have one of these Duo's (and certainly don't plan to buy one).    Clearly if the drives are NOT locked; then it could indeed just be a case of re-initializing the drive to use it with any OS you might choose.  Quite frankly, I'd think it's not a problem -- it's hard to believe the drives would be set up so they aren't useable individually if pulled from the case ... but clearly there is some doubt, so anyone thinking of buying this should certainly be aware of the possibilities.

 

[garycase]

I received mine last week. The individual drives do not have a warranty, only the enclosure. WD says if a drive fails they need the enclosure SN and drive SN and they will replace. I will test today to see if drive can be read outside the enclosure. I suspect that it is just a regular, standard WD 8TB helium filled drive. Someone else I know got 2 from different vendors and all his 6 drives each have their own 2 year warranty which is different from mine marked as OEM.

 

... Definitely looking forward to a report r.e. whether the drives are useable as bare drives.  From your comment r.e. a friend already having done this with 6 drives I suspect they are, but it'd be good to confirm that.

 

[Superorb]

... Definitely looking forward to a report r.e. whether the drives are useable as bare drives.  From your comment r.e. a friend already having done this with 6 drives I suspect they are, but it'd be good to confirm that.

 

I'll update when I get a chance to test. I also updated the first post.

[mr-hexen]

If they work outside the enclosure the lack of warranty isnt hard to over come as these are so cheap you could Self warranty.

[garycase]

If they work outside the enclosure the lack of warranty isnt hard to over come as these are so cheap you could Self warranty.

 

Agree => For two reasons:

 

(a)  As long as you keep the enclosure (stick it in an attic, etc.) you could also re-assemble it and get a warranty replacement;

 

and

 

(b)  even without that, for what's effectively a 25% reduction in price, it's not much of a risk to just "self insure" against any failures.  You can buy 4 of these for the price of 3 bare drives ... so you're effectively getting a "free" spare.  And these are VERY reliable drives, so it's not all that much risk anyway.

 

[Superorb]

Hooking things up here now.

 

From what it sounded like I don't need the enclosure at all. I can sell it and remove the serial number form the enclosure and just keep the serial. With this enclosure the drives are serviceable, so I'd return just the drive if it failed.

[Superorb]

Hooked both drives up to my new Win10 PC and both of them formatted fine and I could copy data to/from them. They appear to be regular 8TB Red drives. I may order another one from another seller to hopefully get some drives with warranties. If not I'll sell the enclosures without the serials so I can retain them in case a drive fails. I ordered mine from Newegg's Ebay store which was shipped form Ingram Micro and not Newegg themselves. May have something to do with the OEM problem.

[Hoopster]

I didn't mean to set off alarms needlessly, but, I did recall reading specifically about the encryption problems with these drives some time ago and that is what truned me off to potentially harvesting drives from the My Book Duo enclosures.  The thread c3 posted seems to validate some of these concerns.  I am glad to hear that it appears possible to remove the drives and format them for other OSes without issue. 

 

The thread c3 posted addresses specifically the problem with accessing the data if the enclosure hardware fails; however, if the drives are removed from the enclosure immediately and are able to be reformatted, then this is clearly a non-issue.  Nevertheless, I do recall reading some time ago that someone had attempted to remove the drives and use them in another system and they were not recognized nor could they be formatted. This may have been after having been used for a time in the Duo enclosure. There was then a brief discussion of the ability to harvest drives with the consensus being to avoid it because of the encrytption issues.

 

Superorb has validated the ability to remove and reformat so, the deal he posted is, indeed, a good deal.