Western Digital easystore 14TB External USB, new, $199.99

Can’t make this stuff up lol!

3 Likes

What is this “HRD DR CPN BNDL 1” thing? I want to know.

See above > Western Digital easystore 14TB External USB, new, $199.99 - #8 by 69chargr

1 Like

I bought one for $199.99 last Friday (plus sales tax in WA $220.19). It’s working fine, mounted under C:\MOUNT.

Unfortunately, when I picked it up, BestBuy double charged me temporarily, by putting a temporary charge of the same amount on my Crypto.com Debit Visa. I called Crypto.com and BestBuy and each blamed the other. Finally they are talking to each other to refund my money.

Edit: Note, the CLI sees the mount point (chia farm summary), but the Electron GUI does not. The GUI doesn’t see it as a share nor shortcut (symbolic link).

Glad it got straightened out.

Let’s see what deals surface on Black Friday.

What I don’t get is why the HD manufacturers don’t get it that we would all be happy with like usb 1.0 drives spinning at like 3k RPM for storage of chia stuff. Its not like we need fast drives for chia farming. we just want high capacity.

They must know, and simply choose to not care, because they know we have no choice but to purchase what they manufacture.

I can think of only two reasons that would get them to care:

  1. More competition. There is nearly none.
    If a handful of other disk makers were competing for market share, then one of them would cater to Chia’s needs. Then the rest of them would do so, too.

  2. If Chia made headlines across all forms of media, reporting on how much disk-related energy is being consumed, and their news story went on to explain how much energy would be saved with slower rotational speeds for Chia purposed drives. Then the disk manufacturers would be embarrassed into making Chia purposed drives.

The manufacturers have implemented power savings options into their drives, but those options are at odds with Chia farming. And the disk manufacturers know this. So this concludes that they really do not care about power savings, until an international spotlight exposes them for not caring.

The real issue is Chia is currently a tiny drop in the bucket compared to global demand for data storage. It’s not profitable to tool up for a tiny niche market especially when the goal is to use recycled hardware.

2 Likes

idk, I’d think ~35 exabytes would be significant

2 Likes

I wonder how much tooling up would be involved?

Would it simply be a minor software change to tell their motors to run slower? Or are their motors designed to run at a fixed speed?

Of course there would be additional logistical requirements, and box design changes, etc, to keep Chia-purposed drives separate from standard drives.

But they could probably accomplish this without too much effort. Western Digital has 60,000+ employees. So this would probably not be a big deal for them to get done.

But if one of their bean counters told executive management that it is, as you said, a drop in the bucket, then they will not be bothered with this.

Companies, at one point, went out of their way to meet their customer’s needs. Today, that is done only when enough $$ are involved.

You used the drive recycling 15% discount?

I do not have a drive that I could recycle, mainly due to data on the drives.

I have some 73GB Seagate SCSI drives. But I have no way to erase them. I will not trust any 3rd party service to do so.

I will have to look for a SCSI → USB adapter, and once-and-for-all erase them and take advantage of recycling offers.

The global sales of hard drives is about 1500 exabytes per year, so it is indeed a drop in a bucket!

Well we hit 35 in what, like 3-4 months? When the price on chia coin begins to climb again, we’ll easily break 100 exabytes. Even now we’ve accounted for over 2% of the global market in just a few months. I’d argue that’s more than a mere drop.

Not to mention, who wouldn’t be willing to pay less money for something thats just used for backups or archiving? I don’t need 10krpm and 300MB/s transfer rates on my backups

It’s 2% of the market on initial setup. I don’t think we’ll see Chia influencing hard drives much. But Chia has influenced the range SSDs models available already. And it will maybe improve the rate at which SSDs are improved.

1 Like

bought 18 of them. Was able to place order, follow up with another order a few minutes later. All online. Did it over the course of about 3 days.

3 Likes

You don’t need to erase them. They are not asking for a new drive on a warranty, but rather anything that closely resembles a HD. You can just take a screw driver, open your drive, damage / remove all platters, and that would be more secure than NSA recommendations. The point of that discount is not to get some old working drives, but rather to sell the existing surplus at any cost.

Have you ever explored the disks that are in a mechanical drive?
I am asking because, a couple of years ago, before disposing of an old hard drive, my brother did what you wrote, and complained to me that those disks were built like tanks; like they were made out of steel.

He did eventually crack them. But he said it was very difficult.

A degausser would be ideal. My old employer had one. Those units are $expensive$.

Yes, I did. I encountered two different platers. One were steel ones, rather hard to bend. The other were glass (I think) that shattered into little pieces. Either one can be easily scratched with a screw driver or knife rendering them unreadable. Although, you cannot reach underneath of those steel ones. Therefore, I wrote that you can just remove them (few more extra screws on the spindle, and then few touches with sand paper, and toss them in the garbage can). So, the worst case it is about 10-15 screws.

Actually, making those scratches with a knife is potentially better, as it will create not just little valleys, but also high ridges around those valleys. This will basically stop any head from flying close to those platters without crashing - further damaging the surface. Of course, if still in doubt, either shatter them (if glass based), or hammer them to fold those steel ones.

Update
I have just opened one 30GB WD300. 8 T9 screws that hold the cover, 6 T7 screws that hold the spindle, unlatch heads to move them off the platters (2 platters in this case). 10 mins job doing it for the first time; worth $40-50 in rebate money. I will try to go to BB today, or tomorrow with mine.

Update 2
Just came back from BB, no problem at all - got my rebate. Looks like they don’t care that those seals are broken (as they accept dead drives).

1 Like