Continuing the data backup theme…
A couple of years ago I bought two Western Digital 20TB Mybook Duo drives in a sale with a plan to migrate most of my media and photo files to high capacity drives. Many people I believe bough these WD devices as buying the drives standalone was far more expensive (they had WD Red or equivalent drives).
Don’t ask why but I’ve only just opened one of them and my word what a noisy device - even 74GB WD Raptor drives I had in RAID 0 on an old PC were quieter and they were bloody noisy!
The WD Duo units contain 2x10TB drives but seem to spin down almost immediately unless doing continuous file transfers and it’s the spinning up that seems very noisy. Not sure if this is because they are configured for RAID 0 striping out of the box, if it’s the drives or the controller hardware of the enclosure.
I have only recently discovered that even if a password is not set for the unit that the enclosure encrypts data regardless so if it fails you’re stuck with a pair of encrypted drives unless you have a similar proprietary WD enclosure which can decrypt. This seems crazy as this cannot be turned off by the end-user.
If you have WD enclosures this may be worth a look as many drives cannot be removed after failure and accessible in a 3rd party enclosure, which is why I’m thinking of simply putting drives in a 3rd party enclosure which doesn’t encrypt automatically: