The New Hard Drive is Here!

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That’s right, one more spankin’ new 8TB drive! This one is a Western Digital My Book 8 TB drive for $169.99 from Google Express. After tax, price adjustment (WTF is that?) and a $20 credit for a first time purchase, it worked out to $163.16. That’s $20.395 per TB. Not too bad! Not as good $19.78 per TB I paid for the Seagate, but I think that extra cash is going to be well worth it.. and let me tell you why.

Apparently the Seagate 8TB Expansion Drive(Amazon) is a Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) drive. What’s that mean? Well that means it’s slow as f**k to plot. There’s a fix in the video below, but I tried that and while it did help.. it didn’t completely fix the problem. Doing this also opens you up to data corruption in the event of a power loss (which I just had…) and for some reason after plotting Windows Explorer refuses to stop accessing the drive, so safely removing hardware keeps giving me errors.

The New Drive

As mentioned, the new drive is a My Book and I’m hoping to see much better performance writing plots out of this one. I’m getting around 17,500 nonces/min with my CPU, so that doesn’t seem to be a problem.. it’s just the write speed to the external. The WD drive uses Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR), so theoretically it should write much faster.

I guess my laptop doesn’t want to actually play nice with USB 3.0 devices, so I can’t have both going at once, but while I wait for my USB hub to arrive I’ll be plotting the last 1TB on my Seagate. I’ll have some test numbers in terms of how long it took when that process is complete.

Western Digital 8TB My Book


Here’s the drive over on Amazon. It was out of stock when I purchased, so I actually grabbed it on Google Express for more than they’re listing it for here. I could have waited.. but I’m impatient.

Amazon Price: $191.25 (not Prime)
Google Price: $169.99 (looks like they’re out of stock as I write this)

Update #1:


The Seagate is actually only 7.27TB, so that’s really $21.77 per TB. NOT as good as the Western Digital.

How are they selling these drives when they’re 730GB shy of their claims?? That’s a pretty huge discrepancy. ** See Update #2

Update #2:

Apparently I’m an idiot when it comes to computer hardware.

Hard disk manufacturers use a calculation of 1KB as 1000 bytes, 1MB is 1000KB, 1GB is 1000MB and 1TB is 1000GB. So to the manufacturer, an 8TB drive is 8 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 = 8,000,000,000,000 bytes of space. Windows however uses 1024 bytes in a KB. So 8,000,000,000,000 / (1024*1024*1024*1024) = 7.27TB.

Still seems a little sketchy on the part of someone.. but I guess that’s just how it is. For more information, check out this Wikipedia article on Kilobyte.

For the record, both Seagate and Western Digital drives register as 7.27TB in Windows.

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