I would avoid an external or at least ensure the hdd inside it pinned to a normal conector.
I certainly lost data on one going bad and had no easy way of extracting data off of it due to having some soldered proprietary connection.
this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2026
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Please read up on CMR and SMR technology. All these backup HDDs in external enclosures are inferior SMR HDDs and really terrible for most uses but the occasional backup of small chunks of data. As soon as you write larger chunks of data at once to SMR drives they slow down to a crawl.
CMR drives are sold as Seagate Ironwolf, WD Red, etc.
I havent seen inside a MyPassport but the MyBook is just a standard 3.5" SATA drive with a USB controller attached. For the smaller form factor, I'd imagine they're more integrated and not able to be shucked which means it could, in theory, be less reliable if the control board broke, but this is just speculation and the odds of that happening are probably pretty low.
That makes sense. And do you know between Mybook and Elements what is the primary difference? Besides the looks of the outer casing.
There may have been a difference at one point before WD realized what people were commonly using these for, but I was previously using 5 shucked Elements and one MyBook (all 8TB) bought between 2018 and 2024 and they were all the same white label drives.
I have bought 7 Elements and they have all lasted at least 9 years. The Mybook series have been known to fail more often and i think they use a different drive than in the elements. I only buy Elements externals and Best buys Easystore since it's the same as elements. I have several 14-18TB drives and they work great for torrenting and data hoarding.
Hey thanks for the feedback. When you say elements, are you referring to the Desktop variant that needs external power or the portable?
The Desktop Variant. They use 3.5" drives and are normally white label drives and last me a long time. Ive had several portable 2.5" drives fail in less than 3 years, but not any 3.5" drives.
Not really. Any drive used for external USB is probably binned for that, meaning it may not have passed enough quality checks for higher-durability internal use.
Piggybacking to ask if anyone knows of any external HDD that is SATA internally so I can take it apart and shove it into my system. The price difference is insane right now
This is called drive schucking, if you search for that you should be able to find some lists
Thank you!
Thank you! I didn't know that was a thing, but since I'm in the market to begin building a NAS, that will surely be useful to know terminology
If it's for a NAS try to make sure it's CMR (conventional) and not a shingled drive (SMR). Shingled will be slower and noisier and SMART tests will take days to run as it gets near full.
ETA: Western Digital - Seagate
And thank you for that, too. I had no idea there would be so much to consider, but I'm glad to be informed.
No problem. I unfortunately found out about shingled drives after I bought them. Now I have a noisy 8TB drive that takes 18hrs to run a long SMART self test plus 2 4TB ones. The transfer speeds are lower too but otherwise they work fine and fortunately I'm just using them for media.
AFAIK there's no advantage to shingled drives at all. They make them because they're cheaper than CMR. It was a few years of the manufacturers selling them before they actually admitted it IIRC.
Any drive you see labeled as NAS or Enterprise will definitely be CMR. It's the regular/gaming/external ones you need to watch out for.
Good question. I would imagine the internal ones would be cheaper, but its the contrary. Crazy
i would avoid smaller wd external hdds, the big ones or seagate ones have sata hdd inside, but those wd ones are usb-only. you get to trash the drive if the converter fails (which is pretty common)
also consider getting larger enterprise 2nd hand drives, those are pretty cheap and nice
Where do you get those?
i believe it really depends on the region you're on sadly :(
i live in a fairly small country and i usually source my drives from a marketplace in some server related internet forum, maybe there's something similar. i guess you gotta try stuff like ebay, facebook marketplace or your equivalent local 2nd hand market platform.
I don't think the durability of data is affected in your examples. All of my external USB disks are kinda old but they run on type-B; the ones with additional power will probably have a faster spin. If running on USB type-C then that may not be an issue either.