I’m looking to expand my storage. I’ve been slowly buying external hard drives for all my media. I’m a noob so feel free to explain things like I’m 5. I’m assuming for the most part the internal and external drives are relatively the same for HHDs with the main difference being what it’s put in. Will a 4 bay non-raid enclosure last longer or work better on average than an exclosure like for example on the WD Elements external hard drive.

  • Far_Marsupial6303BEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    For the most part that is correct.

    At least for desktop externals (ones with a power adapter, not portables) they’re usually just standard HDDs you can shuck.

    There are some weird cases like with portable externals having native USB on the HDD itself (no SATA at all) and for a while many externals were a hit or miss in terms of CMR/SMR but the same can be said about retail HDDs so that issue isn’t specific to externals.

    All 3.5" externals are regular SATA drives.

    All 2.5" WD and Toshiba externals have the USB interface integrated into the mainboard. 2.5" Seagate externals are regular SATA drives.

    All 2.5" externals >500GB are SMR. There’s currently only a few 1TB 2.5" internal CMR drives available.

    All WD drives, 8TB+ are CMR. All Seagate drives 10TB+ are CMR. Unsure about Toshiba.