What Hard Drive is in a Western Digital 10TB EasyStore
/I recently just shucked my first WD 10TB Easystore and as far as I can tell it is a Helium filled hdd, with a 256MB cache and runs at 5400 RPMs. Perfect for a home NAS.
I got mine from Best Buy early Black Friday (BBBF) sale for $179.99, which seems like a good deal when compared to other 10TB hard drives and the $299.99 shelf price. Now this was the BBBF edition that came with the SanDi… WD 32 GB Flash Drive and not the “Normal” EasyStore.
Model and Specs
WD 10TB Easystore
Model: WDBCKA0100HBK-NE32
DCM: MGBJUCM
Drive Model: WD100EMAZ
Drive Family: Not Listed / Not Available
Drive Street Name: 10TB "White Label" 5400RPM 256MB Cache
Origin: Thailand
WD 10TB Easystore non-Black Friday Edition (no USB drive included)
Model: WDBCKA0200HBK-NESN
DCM: MGBLVCM
Drive Model: WD100EMAZ
Drive Family: WD HGST Ultrastar He10
Drive Street Name: 10TB “White Label” 5400RPM 256MB Cache
Origin: Thailand
To my knowledge and from what I have seen other people say (not verified by me), the WD 10TB EasyStore (non BBBF edition) or the on you can find at any retailer, has the same exact same drive in it. The model number for this is, WDBCKA0100HBK-NESN, for anyone who might be curious.
It is very easy to remove these drives from the shell. If you can’t figure it out, simply search YouTube for “How to remove the hard drive from WD EasyStore”. Replacing remove with shuck may yield better results. Also, prepare to cut up a Credit Card unless you have a guitar pick or tools like an iFixIt kit would provide.
What is the White Label Drive
Most likely this is a rebranded HGST DC HC510 or a relabeled WD Gold. If the drive is neither then, well, oops. No matter what we know it is a helium filled drived and is definitely made to be a storage drive. This drive is perfect for your NAS/local storage device. You can put this in a RAID or into tiered storage if that is more your thing. I guess this isn’t a definitive answer but at the end of the day it is a more premium hard drive than you would expect to get unless you out right purchased an equivalently spec’ed WD Red, Gold, etc. How do we know it’s helium filled, let’s just take a quick look at a S.M.A.R.T readout.
Updated Drivers
With the new drivers for DriveDx it has been revealed that the 10TB WDBCKA0200HBK-NESN WD100EMAZ is actually a HGST Ultrastar He10. As reported from the DriveDx SMART Report. See below!
Another Difference
I also happened to notice that on the WDBCKA0200HBK-NESN version, the drive is not labeled “256MB Cache” like the Best Buy Edition NE32. Weird. The HGST Ultrastar He10 is a 7200RPM 256MB Cache drive. But this drive is only 5400RPMs! Rumor says that these drives are actually 7200RPM but have been programmed to report 5400RPM. In this forum they analyzed the rotational speed of the platter disks and found they are actually rotating at 7200RPM. Here are some images making the same claim.
My Use Case
I plan to integrate this drive into my backup server. Not the 24/7 always on back up kind of server either, just a…. plug it into my hot-swap backplane and use a script to back up files to it sort of use. None-the-less I really do need a drive for back ups. I am currently banking on dual parity to save me from data loss, I have been lucky for 4 years and counting. It's only a matter of time before something goes wrong. I've come really close to losing data in the past and the only thing that saved me was my Google Drive backups (think pictures and "important" documents).
I’d really like to have a more serious solution for a backup server than using Windows 10 and RoboCopy but honestly, I’m not sure which operating system to go with. Plus back server will not be on all of the time, so I’m not sure how serious of a solution I need. Only time will tell I suppose. RSync is probably a better alternative but I’ve grown accustom to RoboCopy. Ugh.
Benchmarks
I totally didn’t think of benchmarking the hard drives because in theory they should perform between 150MB/s and 200MB/s. In all my years I have never had a hard drive perform worse than 150MB/s. However, if you really really want to know, then you should definitely check out ServeTheHome.com see all of their benchmarks they have performed.
Spoiler, it performs exactly the same as any other 5400RPM and 7200RPM hard drive. STH saw 210MB/s in Reads and 209.3MB/s in writes. There is not going to be anything earth shattering from benchmarking the hard drives in my opinion but I suppose I can see the value of knowing.
USB Flash Drive
Is the USB Flash Drive that is included with the WD EasyStore any good? Well…. It’s a solid ehhh. It’s okay and it’s certainly nice to have but honestly, I would not buy one. On the plus side, I’m pretty sure SanDisk makes it, I’m pretty sure this is the SanDisk Version, the Glide 3.0 CZ600. Anyway, here is a benchmark of mine.
