Header banner
Revain logoHome Page
Stanislaw Jastrzebsk ᠌ photo
1 Level
340 Review
0 Karma

Review on 2 TB External HDD Western Digital WD Elements Portable (WDBU), USB 3.0, black by Stanislaw Jastrzebsk ᠌

Revainrating 4 out of 5

Good and quality product, but there are flaws.

I made the decision to expand the storage capacity of my Western Digital My Passport 2TB (WDBY8L0020BBK), which I had purchased six years ago. The resemblance between this model and my grandfather is uncanny. After putting the new drives through their paces and contrasting them with a variety of older drives, I came to the unfortunate realization that current drives, even those of the same size, are notably less reliable and significantly slower when it comes to writing random blocks of data. Tiled recording technology, often known as SMR, is used in at least all modern external and laptop hard drives with a capacity of 2 terabytes or more. In order to achieve the desired boost in volume, this technology entails superimposing some disc tracks on top of each other in a partial manner. Because of this, even if just one sector is being recorded on a track, the disk still needs to rewrite a complete tape, which consists of numerous tracks, even though it is only recording one sector. When a large amount of data that is not consecutive has been written to the disc, the write speed of the disc will be greatly slowed down for the next 10–15 minutes as a result of this. Because of this, it is not practical to use contemporary disks for any activity that requires extensive writing to various sections of the storage medium, such as recording a large number of little files or using torrents. Possible option for infrequently recorded, but substantial files (for example, movies). After a few days, slow sectors began to manifest themselves towards the beginning of the disk. It's possible that this happened because of power concerns when trying to connect both drives to the same USB3.0 port using a passive USB hub to share the power. First, the elderly man, at least henna. A WD40NMZW-11GX6S1 disk is put inside. Test of the speed of the USB 3.0 4TB variant Sequential read up to 122MB/s Writes in sequence at speeds of up to 119 MB/s Test of the speed of the USB 2.0 4TB model Sequential read up to 32MB/s Write speeds of up to 27 MB per second in sequence Because of the rewriting of data in the background, the sequential write performance can reduce by as much as 5 to 30 MB per second (on average, something like 16 MB per second). Yet, the elderly man does not have any overwriting in the backdrop. The disc was brought back to the store where it was purchased. Already tried the Toshiba Canvio Advance 4TB, and I encountered the same and even more severe issues. You will have no choice but to settle for the less desirable option as you await new generations of disks (based on HAMR and MAMR technologies).

Pros
  • + A large storage capacity (4 TB) + A attractive and ergonomic enclosure + A compact design
Cons
  • Tiled recording technology (SMR), which, as a result, causes a significant drop in write speed after a prolonged recording of random data blocks. - Cost of the product (more details in the comment) As a result, it is not ideally suited for activities such as defragmenting, writing medium and small files, and downloading torrents (like many modern SMR drives) - After a few days, the problem slow sectors began to occur near the beginning of the disk. - Consumption of current that is sufficiently high. Did not wish to operate a flash drive while connected to a single passive USB hub.