Questions about setting up a network drive

Do you remember when the only way they could put 1GB in a memory card was a miniature hard drive?

BTW: Which option would you chose?

Sidecar Bob said:

I've been doing some research. It seems that the My Cloud comes with a WD Red HDD (designed to be on 24/7 for its entire life) while from what I've found the My Book comes with whatever HDD they have a lot of on hand (usually blue or green).
Apparently the reds have much longer life expectancies.

Standard hard drives will wear out faster by starting and stopping, then by continually rotating. The highest current that a motor faces is when it starts. Also bearings maintain more even lubrication when spinning then when sitting. Hard drive sleep and shutdown modes are for power savings, not to extend life.

Although experts disagree with each other:
Should you leave a hard drive running when it's not in use? | PCWorld

cereberus said:

In reality, storage capacity increases by much more than cost which makes it a bit of a joke when people get concerned about the life expectancy of an SSD.

I used to be one of those people who was overly paranoid about using my SSD too much for fear that I would wear it out. But after several years of usage my health status always showed an incredibly high amount of expected lifetime left.

In the last couple of years I've been working on a program that injects updates of various kinds into Windows images, so in the testing process I'm writing complete Windows images to the SSD over and over and over again along with lots of temporary storage and it's simply not impacting nearly as much as expected.

So I've gone the complete opposite direction. I hammer my SSDs with reckless abandon, especially my smaller SSDs like 500 GB because they can be replaced dirt cheap.

Sidecar Bob said:

Given the options above (bare 4TBWD Red for $100, 4TB WD My Passport for $118 or an external drive from Seagate, Toshiba or other reputable company also around $120) what do you folks think would be my best choice?

BTW: Current prices on drives like this blow me away. 12 years ago I paid $100 for a bare 100GB HDD.

That 4TBWD Red is a poor choice. SMR drive. Stay away from any SMR drive.

What's wrong with SMR? I thought it was better for storing large amounts pf data.

SMR helps keep prices down, but it can be extremely slow. The article below explains the reason for this:

Western Digital, Seagate Are Shipping Slow SMR Drives Without Informing Customers: Reports [Updated] - ExtremeTech

Just to give this some closure, in the end I decided that the My Cloud's Red drive should be OK for the foreseeable future so as long as I have a reliable backup I don't need to replace it now. I didn't trust whether the My Book's drive or enclosure (or both) was the problem so to ordered a new 4TB WD Elements Portable from WD's Amazon store to replace it.

Since I installed the Elements Karen's Replicator has not reported any errors or failures.