Hi, I’m planning to grow my farm, but for practical reasons I want to buy external hdd.
Which one would recommend me?
I’m considering WD Elements, WD My Book, Seagate Plus Hub, or Seagate Expansion.
Any advice will be appreciated.
Thanks.
From my experience and afaik, WD and Seagate are equally good. Just buy the cheapest u can get.
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I have all of the drives that you mentioned in my farm. For farming, I think they are fairly equal. I orginally thought that the two-port USB hub on the Seagate Plus Hub was worthless, but I have to admit that they have come is pretty handie. I wouldn’t pay extra for the ports, but I think the drive is generally more solid that the other housings.
WD drives 8TB or greater and Seagate drive 10TB or greater use CMR drive technology. Smaller drives use SMR which has much lower write performance. But since farming is a write-once-read-many activity, it isn’t really a handicap. Most of my drives are 8TB SMR due to availability and I have no performance problems.
The electric cost to operate a drive is about the same regardless of the size. So bigger drives will have a lower operating cost per TB. However, the purchase price per TB is usually higher.
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Buy Seagate externals 10TB or larger. Should come with a Seagate EXOS drive. These are enterprise grade drives that run at 7200 RPM. Not sure what WD stuffs in their externals now days, but the drives in 10TB and larger Seagate externals are pretty nice.
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I have 3, 10TB Seagate Backup Plus Hub. I shucked 2 of them, both are labeled Iron Wolf PRO NAS.
I was pleasantly surprised since I was expecting Barracudas.
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Thanks to everybody. Today the prices dropped a little. 
I will go with the Seagate Expansion 10TB.
It is the best balance in all the aspect did you say.
Make sure you are using USB 3.0 SS. In other words, make sure you are using an SS port on the drive array and on the pc or your farming time will be terrible.
I found the best price point for me was 8TB drives. Each holds 72 K32s or with me, 35 K33s. You can get enclosed 4 bay arrays for $200 each or go with the plug in arrays for about half the price.
Have fun!
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Thanks, for the advice. I went with the Seagate because it is the best price getting an enterprise hdd inside.
I’m my country, It’s very difficult and expensive to get some hardware 
I only buy 8TB-drives, because I dont want 7200rpm enterprise-drives in my living room.
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Above 8TB, they are both CMR and respectable drives. Under 8TB, you run the risk of getting SMR drives with both WD and Seagate. 6TB and under, you will get an SMR drive from WD and Seagate for sure in a USB3 model. I feel strongly that SMR is not a good value for the money, and that is coming from someone with about 22 SMR 8TB drives 
I have been tracking various larger sized USB and HDD’s for the past 2 weeks, as I am about out of space, and the 14 TB drives in specific are just recently leading the return to normal prices. Since my last update video they are now easily the best price/tb that I have seen just this morning since this all started at the $270 range.
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Hi Guys,
Where do you buy in USA? I’m buying from south america and with all the import costs and limit price per buy i always try to get best possible price.
I always use newegg, b&h and amazon. Do you use another?
Thanks
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I use Amazon and B and H, but in Central America…got no clue.
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Stay away from Seagate Plus Hub unless you are going to take out the HDD from the enclosure. Actually stay away from any external drives that have a USB hub build in as that will add to the limited number of USB devices you can connect to your PC. Each PC USB controller has a limit of how many devices you can connect and on average this is around 32 unless you have a better controller. The issue is that things like USB hubs use up some of these as well and it is not a 1:1 ratio. I learned the hard way with these Seagate Plus Hubs as they are considered 2 devices (HDD+hub) and would suggest you stay as far away from them as possible if you are planning to build USB HDD farm. Also note that 16 port USB hubs are typically made up of 4x4 port hubs so they will eat 4 devices right there. WD Element & Easystore are fast but also a bit bulky and you need to keep some space between them for airflow.
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I agree, the WD external 14TB drives for $270 are the current best choice. If you want a lower $/TB, Walmart has Seagate 6TB in-store for $105, but it is SMR.
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For this use case I think SMR would be perfectly OK.
The problem with SMR is that it will thrash for random read and write (and perform horribly in raid arrays). But, with plots you write a large sequential file to the drive once and after that it’s just mainly accessed for reads.
What matters is for the drive to be spun up 24/7, and surrounded by other drives, and still run reliably. Which would mean Enterprise, or NAS, hardware, which is typically CMR. Often found in higher capacity external drives.
But, if you’re on a budget. I see nothing wrong with SMR drives. They tend to be cheaper. Higher capacity in a smaller footprint.
Although, I have no idea how an SMR drive would behave if you decide to delete a random plot and replot. 
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Yes, the SMR drives seem to be fine for Chia farming. I have quite a few 8TB SMR drives. I replotted them by replacing one plot at a time. There really wasn’t any problem with this at all. One thing that I like about this is that they are generally 5400 RPM, so the continuous power draw while running is a bit lower. But for any additions to my farm, I am using 10TB or larger.
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I can confirm that most of the ones I shucked were EXOS except for one that was Ironwolf pro.
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I got a Barracuda Pro in one 10TB drive.
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Although USB drives are fine, and I have 3 USB drives + 2 USB SATA docks on my farmer, everyone needs to remember that each system has a limit to the number of USB drives that can be connected per USB host controller. I cannot say what the limit is because it varies from motherboard to motherboard and can vary even between production runs of the same motherboard model.
I saw a Linus Tech Tips video about the return of motherboards with 2 USB controllers. That feature on the motherboard they showed was advertised as USB controller 1 for keyboard and USB controller 2 for mouse, to reduce input lag. 2 USB controllers could be useful in this scenario to theoretically allow more USB drives. That said, PCIe may or may not work as NVMe is taking away from the PCIe lanes and some people have had mixed results with USB drives and PCIe.
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Hi! What hard drive did you buy?
I have one of each one of the models because i always try to buy the best price and perhaps paying a little bit more i could be lucky to get a better HD.
Thanks