WD - easystore 12TB External USB 3.0 Hard Drive - Black

If you’re wanting a huge drive at a budget price to shuck and use in a NAS, this is it chief. For folks that are looking for specific model info about the drives inside, both contained a 12tb WD120EMFZ. Bought 2 of these for $179 each and shucked them (removed the drive from the casing) right away. I set them up in a NAS using RAID 1 (mirrored) because they are budget drives that aren’t designed to run 24/7. I wanted to minimize, as much as possible, my concern about data loss. For folks that are shopping for a NAS as well, I’d recommend a Western Digital MyCloud EX2 Ultra. Very cheap (about $150), easy to setup, has a TON of features, and supports these drives!

With streaming being all the rage you might think that the days of making personal rips of your purchased media to be a thing of the past, that is until you watch Netflix, Hulu, DisneyPlus, and others on your new LG OLED 65 or 75" HDTV, all of a sudden you start to notice the terrible compression caused mainly by your internet not being able to pipe enough bandwidth to have your true 4k content look good. So unless you are one of the few people that have a 1GB fiber connection to your house you are going to be better off with purchased physical media, or even a legal personal rip of your purchased media, and where do you store that? Well on your new 12TB hard drives. As a matter of fact you better buy at least 2 as it is a common fact that the larger capacity drives (3TB+) have a much higher failure rate then previous drives and that is no surprise as the price per GB is super low compared to what it used to be so buy one drive to use and one for backup so that if either 1 fails you wont be redoing all the work again. As for quality, there is no doubt that media played from a disk that was ripped from your purchased BD or 4k BD is going to be better than streaming the same title so with that in mind, grab a few of these drives as you can never have enough storage. These WD drives are quite, mainly because they run at lower RPMs and the enclosures are actually fairly good at deadening the noise from the drive. These points give this drive a Excellent value as you can buy 2, 4 or more of these and use one as a useable drive and the other as a backup and you will be fine for the most part. Those are the Pros, now lets hit some of the Cons, you MUST be careful with these drives, one accidental knock over of the drive, even a small one can cause catastrophic damage to the platers, additionally these drives use the incredibly annoying type of USB cable that tends to get lose over time if you unplug and re-plug the cable at the drive, so I recommend unplugging from the end that plugs into whatever device you are using and leaving the end that plugs into the drive plugged in as once they get lose they become very unreliable (basically if you even breath on the cable it can shift slightly and the drive disappears from your system, jiggle the cable and it comes back again, so use the other end when unplugging to take to another system. Another points, as mentioned before, the large drives of today are more fallible and must therefore consider a duplicate drive to clone your data to in case of failure, again I knock 1 point off for Quality because these larger drives have a higher tendency to fail, but that goes for Seagate, HSGT, Toshiba and others. Finally the power connectors on these drives are extremely large and if you are using a battery backup (which you should be) then this one power connector will take up one plug and block another regardless of were you put it as the top end overlaps the outlet above it and if you plug it in the other way then the adapter not only blocks a 2nd outlet but the power wire coming out of it can block even a third outlet so consider getting some small 1.5 foot extension cables to help eliminate this issue. The large power plug makes ease of use a bit frustrating so I knock off a point for having to do some creative wiring in order not to block half my outlets. I hope this helps, as for performance, I transferred a 27GB test file from one eternal drive to another in around 2-3 minutes which is pretty impressive and thus you should have no problems with playing your shows or even using it as a game drive. VipersHardware

This is my second 12GB external drive from Western Digital. I figured since the first one is holding up so well i'd bite it and buy another. After the drive goes to sleep it takes about 10 seconds to wake up to list the contents of the drive. This doesn't bother me but some people are very Impatient so i thought I'd mention it. I'm using this under Fedora Linux, it is formatted with EXT4 and works like a charm. The transfer rates seem fast enough although I've not benchmarked the drive. This drive is a great value when you catch them on sale. The 12GB seems to be the sweet spot for price to capacity.