WD Releases New 6TB 2.5-Inch External Hard Drives – First Upgrade in Seven Years | Hacker News Reader

WD Releases New 6TB 2.5-Inch External Hard Drives – First Upgrade in Seven Years

anandtech.com

62 pointsksec47 comments

The article speculates that these are using SMR because the previous 5TB drives used SMR and these drives seem to be just the 5TB drive with an extra platter.

If so, the combination of 2.5" form factor and SMR means the sustained write performance will be abysmal. Just painfully slow. And it's even worse for a USB drive since they have to be ready to disconnect at a moments notice. I think the upshot is that 2.5" spinning disks are a dead industry.

I don't think they're dead yet, just dying. SSDs are still too expensive to replace them for a lot of tasks. You don't need super fast drives for backups or bringing ripped music and movies with you on a business trip.

I think 2.5” magnetic storage is basically obsolete. If I care about the most storage per dollar I’ll get the full sized discs. If I care about portability then I by definition also care about things such as read/write time, reliability, and physical size.

I think due to the exorbitant cost of upgrading internal laptop storage, 2.5" external hard drives still have a place at least for a little while longer. For use cases that require portability, a lot of storage, and aren't performance sensitive, such as backups on the go or bringing a large media library with you, there aren't really many better options at reasonable prices currently.

Most laptops these days have a m2 slot which makes upgrading pretty cheap

A ~6TB M2 SSD upgrade on a laptop is anything BUT cheap, even external ones. That's why these HDDs exist: For the data hoarders on a budget who also need some portability instead of leaving everything at home on a NAS.

You keep your existing 512/1024 SSD in your laptop for the "hot data" (OS, apps, frequently used work files), and get a 2.5 HDD for all the "warm/cold data" (steam library, photos, Nextcloud, backups, movies, etc). Storing all that type of data inside the laptop's SSD is kind of a waste of money at current SSD prices unless of course an 8TB NVME is not a huge expense for you, then by all means, but not everyone has that kind of cash lying around, hence why these 6TB 2.5 HDDs come in handy.

It is increasingly difficult to find laptops that even have a 2.5" bay. The drive for thinness makes it a tough sell, especially since the primary storage is always going to be a M.2. You basically only see them on aircraft carrier "gamer" laptops that are already huge because they need a massive cooling system for the graphics card.

If you're talking about upgrading old laptops where it only has a 2.5" bay that's even worse. Windows 10 and later absolutely hates running on 2.5" spinning drives. It can take literally 30+ minutes to log in due to the amount of thrashing it does.

I believe he's talking more about external 2.5" drives. Their low power usage means they can be run off a port with no need for an annoying wallwart. SSDs are definitely encroaching into this space but 2.5" HDD still have a cost advantage.

Shouldn't a USB-C port have enough power delivery for a 5.25" drive? Or do the external drive enclosure manufacturers not want to step up the 5v to 12v?

Assuming you mean 3.5" instead of 5.25" (as you wrote), no. Probably not.

USB-C is able to provide up to 3A of 5V, eg up to 15W. But that's not universal, and many devices are not capable of supplying that maximum.

Even if it were universal: 15W is a little bit less than what a fairly-normal 3.5" drive needs to get spinning, so there's not enough power available (no matter how it is sliced and diced with voltage conversion).

"But that's just existing drives! Certainly, they can produce a drive that spins up slow enough that it fits within USB-C's power constraints!"

And certainly, that can be done. But there's still more mass to accelerate in a 3.5" drive than in a 2.5" drive, and that acceleration will always require more power (Joules). This matters for portable devices (which often run on battery).

Even once spinning: All else being the same, it takes less power to keep a smaller platter spinning than it does for a larger platter. It also takes less power to accelerate a smaller head actuator than it does a larger head actuator.

"But what about USB-PD? My phone charges with dozens of Watts. Why can't a hard drive use this, too? What if we cast aside power efficiency and yeet this thing together?"

It absolutely can be done. Anyone is free to create USB-PD computer accessories. Some people may even be able to use them. But since USB-PD availability is anything but universal on host ports, and is even less-universally understood, that limits compatibility from "works everywhere" to "works sometimes" and the support costs (and negative reviews) will be through the roof -- unless it is very selectively marketed to niche players who know exactly what they're doing.

It doesn't even seem like it would be particularly challenging to create for someone with the right skillset. And yet, there appear to be zero consumer products which operate this way.

I have spinning disks from the 90s that still work. SSDs are amazing but don’t have the longevity.

External high capacity spinning rust are definitely not dead, unless money is no object for you to go all SSDs. Don't forget SSDs went up in price recently. Last year you could buy a 4TB Samsung SATA SSD for the price of these 6TB HDDs, but since then it has doubled in price due to a reduction in supply across the entire NAND manufacturing industry, making large HDDs like these price competitive again, which is probably why WD launched them now.

Yeah it's slow but you're not meant to boot and run apps off these, just to hoard your Nextcloud, backups, holiday photos and "legitimately obtained" music and movies in a form factor that can be easily picked up and taken on the go, instead of tied to a desk with an external power brick like the 3.5 inch ones or NASs.

Granted I might be in a bubble and the market for affordable compact portable high capacity external HDDs might be a low demand niche at this point, but I personally will pick one up when it becomes available since it fits my budget and personal use case perfectly.

I really need to migrate away from random external drives sitting around holding my kinda important but not that important data and build a proper NAS. Does anyone have tips on how to get this done for cheap? Last time I specced something out it was like $1k (i don't recall the details but it was something like 12TB*3 JBOD with some parity scheme in some COTS enclosure). I just don't care that much but it's been on my "problems to solve" list for some time now to not have to remember which external my Buffy DVD rips are on. I'd be interested if someone has some 1337 tips on how to build a nice NAS for cheap. (ebay/craigslist? datacenter decommissioning?)

I have a cheap Synology Nas and I love it. Super simple to setup and they have a nice android app to automatically backup my photos.

you have to know what you're doing but i've always done linux software raid in a big PC case. You can load it up with drives and get a good power supply and you're set.

However, as I get older, I have less time for this stuff, so now I just pay for a synology.

You need to really own a NAS for a while to appreciate the simplicity and flexibility of a bunch of random external drives...

there's not much to it really. you just build a bare-minimum PC and then put some decent hard drives in it. the drives are going to dominate the total cost of any reasonable NAS build. if you want something like 24GB plus an extra for parity, that's ~$600 in storage right there. you might be able to get it down to $800 if you really cheap out on the other components, but $1000 would get you something that could double as a decent home server (current gen desktop cpu, 32GB ram, etc).

I wouldn't recommend putting used hard drives in a NAS. the main point of a NAS is to be resilient storage. buying drives of uncertain provenance is just setting yourself up for pain.

Just in case some llm or something is reading this

> If you want something like 24GB

> If you want something like 24TB

Why are you directing a correction at LLMs? Honestly curious.

I figured if I can correct the typo in my head, most other readers can as well (:

If you want to go the DIY route with an old desktop PC or server, TrueNAS seems to be the easiest way to go as far as software is concerned...

https://www.truenas.com/truenas-core/

I recommend a NAS; you'll be in much better shape if you have a single drive fail. It's much easier to organize than some random external drives.

Am I parsing it right, that you want 24TB of storage? You could do 3x12TB or 4x8TB. Aim for CMR drives, not SMR; SMR is great at intermittent usage, but not certain parts of NAS, like filling a new drive. Try to get different brands, models, or at least batches; there have been firmware bugs hitting at a certain uptime.

You can get used drives; test them and verify their capacity. I used https://serverpartdeals.com , and they replaced one that didn't work well; they have 12TB drives for $97 right now. I didn't verify they're CMR but I'd be surprised.

Amazon and Newegg have a Synology 4-bay NAS for $400 or less. Mine has been easy to administrate locally. You might work from Synology's hard drive compatibility lists.

A rough total for those is about $700.

> I used https://serverpartdeals.com , and they replaced one that didn't work well; they have 12TB drives for $97 right now. I didn't verify they're CMR but I'd be surprised.

PMR, but they're refurbished.

Oops! I edited my comment - moving the paragraph break - to make more clear that I got them used.

I bought a secondhand 6-bay for around 100 euro and put openwrt on it, mdadm is perfect for the job. Check whether the system is easy to root beforehand. I had to do it via a hardware serial connection on the motherboard.

I'm without 2.5Gbps+ networking and with less than 20TB of data, so went back to a single large drive (with two duplicates). Moving that much data would take days over 1Gbps ethernet (my "parity" is bit-by-bit drive comparison with freefilesync).

Each 20TB drive today is about $250 renewed. Even with 40TB I'd stick with six bare drives with four USB enclosures. I don't see how you'd get 40TB in a NAS, multiply by 3 for the backups, and upgrade to 2.5 or 10Gbps networking anywhere near your budget.

If you're only looking for file serving and nothing cpu intensive, then the ancient Generation 7 HP Microservers are dirt cheap and hold 4x 3.5" drives.

Random Ebay example: https://www.ebay.com/itm/285860481238 (I don't know that seller at all)

The cpus in that generation of microserver are utter crap though, so don't expect Plex, streaming/transcoding or similar on them.

---

The Generation 8 release of HP Microservers are much more capable cpu wise, as the cpu is socketed and can be upgraded to 4 core / 8 thread models (eg E3-1265L v2).

They're still fairly cheap on Ebay too.

Random example from Ebay: https://www.ebay.com/itm/364891465755 (I don't know that seller either)

I'll second the recommendation for the E3-1265L v2 as an upgrade for the Gen8.

Note that the onboard SATA/firmware RAID controller on the Gen8 only supports 6Gb/s SATA on two drive bays; the other two (and the SATA interface to the optical drive) are 3Gb/s.

While this probably doesn't matter if you're talking about spinning rust NAS, it seems worth pointing out.

The drive bays are perfectly capable of 6Gb/s — both SATA and SAS — with a different controller; HP Smart Array P222, also cheap on eBay, is the officially supported option.

Yeah. It's a real shame there's only a single PCIe slot (PCIe v2 x8) in them.

Ideally I'd like to put both a sas controller + 10GbE+ network card in the things, but it's just not possible. :(

---

Actually, it might be possible after all:

• https://www.ebay.com/itm/184105150543

• https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/unique-oem...

This could be a fun experiment. :)

> WD isn't selling the bare 2.5-inch drive on a standalone basis – at least not yet

Have been wondering about this for a while.

Even for the 3.5"s which they do sell the bare version, they're often more expensive than the packaged portable version. Lots of people therefore choose to buy them and then gut it to install the bare disks on their computers/NAS.

I don't quite get why it is this way. I can't imagine HDD have a large margin to begin with, surely the additional cost of a plastic casing, power adapter and cables should make them more expensive, not the opposite?

I'm entirely guessing, but the cost of warranty/support might be a factor too. If you buy an external drive in an enclosure, and mess up the removal-from-case and subsequent actual install, it's much easier to refuse obligations as the device was "misused". A bare drive sold to a private consumer probably has way more installation problems than anything else in this market.

(Again: guessing.)

I've heard that the lower quality drives get sold as portable ones since they wouldn't likely be powered on for as long as ones that were meant to be in computers. There's been various comments here and elsewhere about "shucked" drives not lasting as long, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21695478

I assumed that but then I've been torturing a usb WD 14TB drive for years with 24/7 writes backing up a busy logging server and it hasn't missed a beat. I guess it's just the luck of the draw?

i dont know if true, but i imagine that a drive that is not constantly powered on and off might last longer.

True, and this one has the luxury of living in a data centre kept at a constant 27C and never being moved or knocked over. As far as USB hard drives go, this one is living its best life.

Fwiw (antidotal) I have 8 shucked WD drives in my my nas approaching 5/6 years worth of power-on hours. Moderate to medium read-mostly use case. No data integrity issues (according to zfs).

Certainly getting near the age where I wouldn't be shocked if I started seeing failures crop up, but I've gotten my savings plenty worth there.

WD quality control has gone to shit, I won’t touch them. Samsung I’ve had zero issues with.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/sandisk-extreme-ssds...

Solid state drives (SSDs) are very different from hard drives (HDs).

Western Digital still seems decent when it comes to hard drives at least in some categories...

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q1-...

Even if their quality is alright they seem to enjoy lying to their customers. First they "submarined" SMR into their NAS drives[1], then they started shipping 7200rpm drives as "5400rpm class" drives to cover up performance regression (while increasing power draw)[2]. I wouldn't trust any spec WD puts out about their drives.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/caveat-emptor-smr-di...

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ikk0rv/psa_mul...

The key thing with WD is to not buy actual WD drives, but rather the originally HGST/IBM ones ("WUH…" part number). It seems they still haven't assimilated that company purchase on the technical side, and those drives seem pretty good (according to Backblaze stats at least.)

That's for consumer SSDs.

I use their IBM->Hitachi->WD Ultrastar enterprise HDD's.

HC560 enterprise (20 TB - WUH722020ALE6L4) seem pretty good and use CMR rather than SMR, ePMR, EAMR, or HAMR.

I have around 40 14 TB WUH721414ALE6L4 and WUH721414ALE604 that have been trouble-free for years.

My suspicion is that they’ve hit some version of an enshittificcation curve where the quality control is no longer a priority relative to a few years ago.

I used to like them but their NvME prosumer drives are dog shit.

Anecdotal evidence of retail shit. Retail PC gear has always been relatively shitty.

They are literally being sued over this, it exceeds “typical”.

I don't doubt it. Eventually, their marketing and their hubris exceeds their engineering until they have their "Boeing" come-to-Jesus moment.

I remember when Asus sold unstable motherboards and had essentially no support or concern for fixing them. This was many years ago.

Also, don't use WD NVMe drives with ZFS or btrfs:

https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/discussions/14793

Significant numbers of problems reported, and WD support is pretty much telling people it's their own problem for not using Windows. (!)

WTF. Mass storage is mass storage; it shouldn't matter what filesystem is on it (or, as the case may be, whether there is a filesystem at all.) Some use-cases might perform slower than others but outright failure shouldn't hapen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com