Saw this deal when looking around the store. Not too shabby for $149
Western Digital 5TB My Passport USB 3.2 External HDD $149 + Shipping / Pickup @ Umart
500
lightfoot on 21/04/2021 - 17:27 umart.com.au (1112 clicks)
Last edited 21/04/2021 - 17:49 by 2 other users
Last edited 21/04/2021 - 17:49 by 2 other users
Related Stores
closed Comments
price matched at JB ; )
Noice!
This is a pretty fantastic deal. I'd probably rip it out and use it internally
Surely these will have soldered a USB like most WD portables
I would too but unfortunately you can't take out the drives in WD portable form factor drives as they don't have a sata connector on them. I would never buy a WD 2.5 portable because if the USB board fails you lose access to your data and if the drive starts to fail you can't get a direct interface to it for recovery software.
Yes, your second chance to get access to data on your failed drive has been removed.
Hello Agret,
Isn’t this the situation for all other 2.5 portables?
Just wanted to double check
not necessarily. Some portables are just an 2.5 HDD inserted into an external case and the drive itself retains its standard connector. I had another brand fail on me, but i was able to extract the drive, put it into another case i bought form aliexpress and was able to continue using it. If these ones are soldered and don't have a standard connector, then that's a no go for me.
Seagate 2.5" still do have SATA connectors, WD and Toshiba mostly don't
How does this compare to the Ultra version? I know it's a bit more at $163 in Officeworks for 4TB, but it has USB-C so I take it speeds are better? Any difference in weight / physical size?
Speed will be limited by speed of the single drive, so about 100-150MBps which is well within 600MBps bandwidth of old USB3.0
Interesting, so technically there wouldn't be any difference between USB-C and this USB-A 3.2? Might as well get this one then for the price.
You need really fast NVMe SSDs to take advantage of USB 3.2, for HDD there won't be any difference except size of connector.
If you're into the speed, I would recommend going for a SSD. Longer lifespan as well due to no moving parts.
Yeah, but sadly the prices for this size are crazy :(
ultra similar price @ umart - good if you have macbook. note that the usb c cable included does not work with macbook due to the connector length.
cheap about $160 for 4tb .Whaaaaaat??
How does that work (or not)?
you should be able to pricebeat at OW.
https://www.officeworks.com.au/shop/officeworks/p/wd-5tb-my-…
$163
It is possible to use this as a permanent external HDD for a PC? or is that a bad idea?
Its definitely possible. Just plug it in and dont unplug it!
Why would you use an external drive permanently?
Almost definitely better off buying an internal drive and installing it instead.
To answer your question though, it would work, but it's a bad idea to use a WD one for that. If you're using it a lot, the board on it can fail, and with WD, that means you can't use the drive at all.
With other brands like Seagate, if the board fails, you can replace it or take the drive inside out of the enclosure and use it as an internal drive or with a different sata to usb adapter.
I thought this was significantly cheaper than internal drives thats why. but you're right, I won't risk it
If you're looking to save money on storage, look into shucking.
Quite a few Seagate external drive models have good models of internal drives in them, and it's easy to buy those then remove the drive inside and then you've saved $100 or so on the internal drive.
Worth noting you can run into warranty issues if the drive is shucked, so before shucking the drive, run a full read/write test on the drive to check for bad blocks etc first. There's tools to do this for you. And of course, you should still be covered under ACL, as ACL applies unless you make a modification that causes the failure.
It's not a bad idea if you're always careful. Use an internal drive if you don't trust yourself. If you aren't transferring between two devices then I'd recommend an internal drive.
Can you take the HD out?
It's WD, so probably not.
I bought one of these a couple of months ago to run off my nvidia shield as plex server drive. Works really well. Runs pretty cool.
Queue the comments about it being useless on account of its USB native board.
If that's your grand plan for data protection might want to rethink your life choices.
Sometimes you stole unimportant data on a hard drive (movies, tv shows, steam games, YouTube clips etc) that aren't worth backing up but are still easier to copy to another drive if you can to avoid a re-download process. Not worth investing in data protection.
In my experience with portable drives it is not uncommon for the USB controller to fail if the drive has been used a lot and it's far cheaper to buy another enclosure to chuck the drive into than an entire replacement drive.
Depends how much you value your time I guess, 5TB can hold A LOT of data. For the sake of $150ea personally they're disposable at that price, even if you can get it again easily just downloading 5TB is crazy time intensive exercise.
I guess my point is I wouldn't plan to rescue my data by replacing the data board. And if that time comes there's no guarantee you'd even find one.
Price now shows as $159
I have the 4TB Seagate 2.5" Portable external usb 3.0 and the board isn't soldered to the drive. You can take out the drive and use it as a SATA drive in your pc just fine. I had no idea WD solders it that's just meh. The Seagate's use an internal SATA to USB3.0 adapter inside
For those still interested (like me) the 4TB Ultra version is still on sale for $149 and can obviously be price matched where desired :)
Please add store name and +Delivery