5TB drive prices

Today at Costco, I saw a 5TB external USB3 drive and enclosure.
For $139. Seagate.
It's probably less than 7200RPM.

In the past, I've found 7200RPM drive in enclosure (Seagate) w/USB enclosure cheaper than a similar "bare" drive.

Yes, this seems to be the new way to buy large capacity drives. Wouldn't touch a Seagate myself though. And, you have to be wary that the drive inside has actual SATA connections and is not a proprietary type of plug or a USB3.0 connection (which is just as bad).

I have two Seagate USB3 enclosures and they have ordinary SATA drives. I doubt they'd do a special non-SATA interface - too costly.
In one case, I took the drive out of the USB3 enclosure, put it in a comptuer and put a smaller drive into the USB enclosure. With Seagate's plastic enclosure, I found on the internet a video of how to get the plastic case open. Hopeless without this video due to the tricky plastic snaps.

Seagate vs. WD vs. Hitachi etc. I used to be WD-only. But in the last couple of years, I don't think either is worse than the other. Both tend to send used/refurb drives as warranty RMA replacements. I hate that - you don't know how many hours are on this "recertified" drive. But then, my Vizio TV failed in warranty and they sent a replacement that was an inferior similar product and said, tough luck.

That is the point though, some do use special connectors and not standard SATA ports. Buyer beware.

L&LD said:

That is the point though, some do use special connectors and not standard SATA ports. Buyer beware.

Click to expand...

Oh. I've not seen that in a name brand USB3 enclosure.

You've been lucky then.

what's an example of a non-SATA drive inside an USB enclosure? (Excluding old IDE drives)?

western digital's latest passport line has the usb part of the drive's circuit board with no sata interface. Supposedly it is better/more efficient for external drives than again it depends on what diagnostic tools are available for usb hard drives vs sata in the case of hard drive failure where you need to recover data.

Amazon has the same price on it currently. Now waffling between the 4TB and 5TB USB3 external drive. A couple of weeks yet before I need to make up my mind.

Tiger Direct has the 5TB Seagate expansion external enclosure for US$129 with free shipping. I have 7 of these and they work ok. I get 80-100MBps write speed to the drive depending on the type of file. I have put them in my servers (taken out of the enclosures) and they work better than in the enclosures. I have experienced some disconnects when trying to do backups or file transfers greater than 100GB in size. I have never had disconnects or problems with the drives I took out of the enclosures; just with the ones in the enclosures.

Warranty on these drives is 2 years. Warranty is void if you take them out of the enclosures.

These drives in the enclosures work fine for video streaming of 3-4 simultaneous video streams. That is more limited by my server CPU than by the read speed of the HDD/enclosure.

The dropped connections when writing files >100GB (multiple files that total >100GB) is the only reason why I don't wholly endorse these drives. That, and the limited warranty. If you want to void the warranty and put the drives in the PC/server drive bays, then you just have to contend with no performance issues but no warranty.

I found this youtube video on opening a WD 2TB USB3 drive/enclosure.
at about 3:30 into the video he gets the plastic open.

2.5 inch drive.
I see that it has USB on the drive board rather than as a SATA to USB on a separate board. Must cost less and is slightly smaller overall.

All the USB3 drives that I've cannibalized have been with 3.5 in. drives. I buy 3.5 in. when the goal is to put the drive inside a PC or NAS.

The one 2.5in Seagate USB3 drive I have - is plugged into my NAS as a backup in NTFS format- to simplify reading on a PC in an emergency.

L&LD said:

That is the point though, some do use special connectors and not standard SATA ports. Buyer beware.

Click to expand...

I've seen this first hand on a smaller 2.5 inch "pocket" drive... was a bit of a surprise... same mechanical part, but unique controller.

The video, above, must be rather old... perhaps before some vendors starting using drives without standard SATA connectors on the drive PCB.

Like mentioned above about knowing what connector is inside the case. I have seen the usb adapter inside the case soldered right to the controller of the disk when I was expecting some sort of adapter to sata. Its too bad there is not a web site that list's more details about these drives. I always am interested to know the power consumption, and that is very difficult to find as well.

FWIW - 5TB USB3 drives have hit the big-box level of $150, e.g. Fry's and BestBuy local in San Diego

Costco is even lower, perhaps Sam's Club as well...

Pretty good value there... but part of me is really scared about having up to 5TB at risk in a single drive -- that's a huge amount of data to risk on a single point of failure...

sfx2000 said:

FWIW - 5TB USB3 drives have hit the big-box level of $150, e.g. Fry's and BestBuy local in San Diego

Costco is even lower, perhaps Sam's Club as well...

Pretty good value there... but part of me is really scared about having up to 5TB at risk in a single drive -- that's a huge amount of data to risk on a single point of failure...

Click to expand...

You know I thought that when the 3 TB drives came out. I guess we have to adjust.

The good news is that one big TB drive is rather inexpensive.
The bad news is that one big TB drive holds a lot of data.

stevech said:

The video, above, must be rather old... perhaps before some vendors starting using drives without standard SATA connectors on the drive PCB.

Click to expand...

The one I saw with custom connectors was a combo USB2/FW400 pocket drive - I would have guessed that it had an interposer with the appropriate chipset into a PATA drive, but no, it was a custom controller board... weird, but it worked, and was fairly fast for it's day... surprisingly, it wasn't that expensive, considering the FW400 interface - the Firewire market isn't that big... even at the time..

Of course, USB3, eSATA, and Thunderbolt make that point pretty much moot these days...

I purchased a 5tb Seagate Expansion drive recently for $165 Canadian which is about the same as what it is on Amazon.com. Here in Canada the 4tb bare drive is $10 more than the enclosed one.

Just Checking said:

Tiger Direct has the 5TB Seagate expansion external enclosure for US$129 with free shipping. I have 7 of these and they work ok. I get 80-100MBps write speed to the drive depending on the type of file. I have put them in my servers (taken out of the enclosures) and they work better than in the enclosures. I have experienced some disconnects when trying to do backups or file transfers greater than 100GB in size. I have never had disconnects or problems with the drives I took out of the enclosures; just with the ones in the enclosures.

Warranty on these drives is 2 years. Warranty is void if you take them out of the enclosures.

These drives in the enclosures work fine for video streaming of 3-4 simultaneous video streams. That is more limited by my server CPU than by the read speed of the HDD/enclosure.

The dropped connections when writing files >100GB (multiple files that total >100GB) is the only reason why I don't wholly endorse these drives. That, and the limited warranty. If you want to void the warranty and put the drives in the PC/server drive bays, then you just have to contend with no performance issues but no warranty.

Click to expand...

Yeah, Newegg had the Seagate 5TB on sale for $119 about a week ago and I snapped it up. I haven't run in to >100GB drops, BUT I have run in to overheating issues.

That said, when I tried to drag and drop ~1.5TB of files from my server to the drive on my desktop, it transfered at about 200B/sec for about 15s (yes, BYTES per second) and then the drive disconnected and reconnected. Rinse and repeat a couple of times. I then ran Synctoy with the same thing, it synched just fine until it got about 600GB deep, and then the drive disconnected and reconnected. I tried transfering individual video files after that, about 50% of the time a single file would transfer okay, about 25% of the time I could get 2-3 video files transfered okay. Any large copies (5-10 video files, or a directory of images) of multiple files and it would hang and disconnect the drive often without transfering anything.

Again, let it cool off for 15-20 minutes and I managed to copy a few hundred GBs before it shat itself again.

The next morning it had no issues transfering about 300GB of image directories and the next night I copied about 800GB of video files without any issues. HOWEVER, I did swap USB3 ports from what I am pretty sure were the Asmedia controller ports (front of my desktop) to the Intel ports. So some of it COULD be that it is related to the Asmedia controller on my mother board and NOT the Seagate external drive itself.

I'll be watching it. I have everything last drop backed up to the 5TB USB3 drive now though (and I have done some short drive tests on it and they check out fine). So tonight I get to swap in my 3TBx2 drives for a RAID0 config and transfer everything from the server to my desktop. Tomorrow I'll do the same for the server transfering from my desktop.

Annoyingly it has taken three tries to get the drives from Amazon. I have a pair of 3TB Seagates (one in server, one in desktop) now. I ordered another pair from Amazon when they recently had the drives at $55 from Amazon warehouse deals. Got the drives. 1 all correct and working, 2nd drive was in a baggie labeled with the 3TB model number, but it was a 500GB Seagate laptop drive in a tiny baggie. Sent it back, got the proper drive. Desktop will not finish posting with that drive connected (Intel RAID pre-boot environment sees it, but I can't get in to the environment as BIOS doesn't finish posting and it goes RAID pre-boot screen, BIOS/finish POST, then you can get in to the RAID environment). Returned yet again, lasted drive I got boots and works fine. Grrrr, but at least soon I'll have 6TB/5.4TiB of yummy fast storage in my desktop and in my server with 5TB/4.5TiB to serve as a secondary back-up (desktop and server are already mirrored for storage).

Ideally I'd have a NUC or NUC like device running as a full back-up server with the 5TB external drive hung off of it with frequent back-ups and a 2nd 5TB doing cold back-ups, but until I am "rich", not happening.