July 28, 20178 yr I usually hook up the externals to usb3 and run 2 cycles in the enclosure. If successful, I shuck and run another for good measure. If the enclosure is usb3, the preclears are almost as fast in the enclosure as they are out
July 28, 20178 yr Drives can easily hit 50-55C+ preclearing in a USB enclosure box. If you're going to preclear them like that, blow a fan on them! It still may not cool them sufficiently, but better than nothing. Preclearing in an oven does more harm than good! Even if they come out clean, you may have significantly affected their useful life.
July 29, 20178 yr I purchased 8 of these drives today at BestBuy, Madison, WI. All 8 are WD Red 256MB Cache. Build date of 06/17/2017
July 29, 20178 yr Author Must resist...but $160 is incredibly cheap for an 8TB NAS drive. Got a Lian-Li PC Q25 lying around begging for some hardware occupants.I can't believe these drives are so cheap. They are easy to shuck without breaking the tabs.Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
July 31, 20178 yr Yup, it's over But I nabbed 2 online and they shucked no problem with 4 pieces from my old PayPal debit card and my fingernails without a tb broke that I I can tell. I'm not going to snap it back together to test to be sure. Took my drobo5N (6+6+8+3+3) 40 hours to rebuild but it's happy. The second drive is going into the open spot in unraid server plus @TinkerToyTech
August 2, 20178 yr I was able to stop by 2 Best Buys to get 2... for $160 each They passed preclear with flying colors... what an awesome deal. I wasn't even looking to upgrade ha ha ha
August 9, 20178 yr On 7/31/2017 at 5:47 PM, TinkerToyTech said: Yup, it's over But I nabbed 2 online and they shucked no problem with 4 pieces from my old PayPal debit card and my fingernails without a tb broke that I I can tell. I'm not going to snap it back together to test to be sure. Took my drobo5N (6+6+8+3+3) 40 hours to rebuild but it's happy. The second drive is going into the open spot in unraid server plus @TinkerToyTech Ok, I put a fan on my other 8tb drive I purchased and ran a preclear, but it appears to be 'stuck'at 99% of its out of server still in the enclosure status before I start tearing things apart and putting this drive into the unraid, what do you think? is it safe to keep/use this drive? ############################################################################################################################ # # # unRAID Server Preclear of disk 3753474A45424543 # # Cycle 1 of 1, partition start on sector 64. # # # # # # Step 1 of 5 - Pre-read verification: [14:56:02 @ 148 MB/s] SUCCESS # # Step 2 of 5 - Zeroing the disk: [14:47:20 @ 150 MB/s] SUCCESS # # Step 3 of 5 - Writing unRAID's Preclear signature: SUCCESS # # Step 4 of 5 - Verifying unRAID's Preclear signature: SUCCESS # # Step 5 of 5 - Post-Read in progress: (99% Done) # # # # # # # # # # # # ** Time elapsed: 14:53:01 | Current speed: 149 MB/s | Average speed: 149 MB/s # # # ############################################################################################################################ # Cycle elapsed time: 44:36:24 | Total elapsed time: 44:36:24 # ############################################################################################################################ Edited August 9, 20178 yr by TinkerToyTech added preclear status info text
August 13, 20178 yr On 8/9/2017 at 7:31 AM, bjp999 said: Are you able to access a smart report? yes, I checked it with piriform speccy, on my win10 machine, in a usb toaster, and it reports all in the Good
August 19, 20178 yr FYI, this is back as of today; $159 @ BestBuy.com. My local BestBuy had a mix of the Thailand (which use the larger cache drives) and Chinese produced items: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-easystore-8tb-external-usb-3-0-hard-drive-black/5792401.p?skuId=5792401
August 19, 20178 yr Just picked up two, both the larger cache. Had to get them to price match at check-out as they were still labeled as $179 in the store. Preclearing now.
August 19, 20178 yr Are they both WD Red Helium - just one larger cache? Is there a way to tell from the outside packaging?
August 19, 20178 yr 29 minutes ago, bjp999 said: Are they both WD Red Helium - just one larger cache? Is there a way to tell from the outside packaging? I had always thought that the WD80EFZX helium and the WDC_WD80EFAX were non, but I'm not sure.
August 25, 20178 yr Author 7 hours ago, jtech007 said: Price back down to $169.99 LOL - follow the bouncing ball! This drive has had so many different prices at Best Buy that it makes one's head spin. Actually, I think that is how they price it. They have a bunch of prices on a wheel and they spin it each week to determine that week's price. I have seen it at $299.99, $279.99, $249.99, $199.99, $179.99, $169.99 and $159.99. I got all mine at $179.99 and now I feel ripped off!
August 26, 20178 yr And it's back up to $199 now. I bought at $199, $179 and $159. Still all good deals.
August 26, 20178 yr Picked up two at $159 yesterday. Shucked and preclearing with a fan pointed at them. Fan made a difference. Went from 42C to 30C
August 27, 20178 yr So I can shed a little bit of light on why the price bounces around so quickly. The wholesale cost of the drives is $159.00. If they're at $159.99, they're using them as essentially a loss leader and making a grand total of $1.00 of profit off of the drive (likely actually losing money because of associated costs with transport, storage, labor, etc.). They put them on sale frequently because they have access to a rather large supply of them, and they're exclusively provided to Best Buy (the whole easystore line is a BBY exclusive they negotiated with WD) at low wholesale cost because BBY at this point stocks almost exclusively WD drives, at least in stores. Also someone asked above if there is any way to tell from the outside packaging whether the drive inside is a WD80EFZX with 128mb cache, or a WD80EFAX with 256mb cache. Short answer: there is, and I've only seen one report of it being inaccurate. If you flip the box over, on the underside with the barcodes it should say Manufactured in Thailand or Manufactured in China. The Thailand drives are the 256mb variant, Chinese variant is the 128mb variant. Also, if you purchase a drive and it's within the 15 day return period, you can still price match the new sale price so long as it's not an hourly sale (yes that's a thing) or during Thanksgiving weekend (Thurs-Mon). In-store you'd just take in your receipt and speak to customer service, online is a little bit trickier but you can do so by contacting the corporate 1-888-BEST-BUY phone number.
August 28, 20178 yr Author 21 hours ago, Cel said: Also someone asked above if there is any way to tell from the outside packaging whether the drive inside is a WD80EFZX with 128mb cache, or a WD80EFAX with 256mb cache. Short answer: there is, and I've only seen one report of it being inaccurate. If you flip the box over, on the underside with the barcodes it should say Manufactured in Thailand or Manufactured in China. The Thailand drives are the 256mb variant, Chinese variant is the 128mb variant. I bought three from BB four months ago. Two boxes say "product of Thailand"; the other says China. The identification string in unRAID reports all three as WD80EFZX drives. This does not change the fact that these are great drives at a great price, but, in my case, country of origin does not seem to have any bearing on the model number/cache size. Maybe this only applies to recently (as in the last two/three months) manufactured drives. Edited August 28, 20178 yr by Hoopster
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