MY Book/Passport VS Easystore

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
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Hi all. I need to buy a few new drives and was ready to buy a couple My Book’s from Best Buy when I noticed that all of a sudden they sell new WD drives under the “Easystore” label. They have these in addition to the latest My book and Passport models that they have sold since late last year. The new Easystore models are currently on sale and are cheaper than the existing MB/PP models but I noticed their regular price is listed as higher than the MB/PP equivalent size drives. I also noticed that the new Easystore models use the previous generation housing and not the newer, updated housing of the MB/PP. Other than that the only other difference I can see is that there is a 2 year warranty on the Easystore as opposed to the 3 year on the MB/PP models

So the question is, what is the difference? Why are these suddenly available at Best Buy? Why do they use the older housing and which option is better? What difference would I notice between the Easystore models and the existing MB/PP models and which is the better choice? The new Easystore models are not even listed on the WD site so I’m wondering if these were a way to get rid of old leftover housings or drives. Any help would be greatly appreciated as I need to purchase these asap. Thank you to anyone who takes a few minutes to help.

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Ya know, there are such things as “house brands,” and if Best Buy is the only place that sells them, well, duh, it is a brand just for Best Buy. Who knows what is in them? They are probably good drives made for a price point. One year less warranty means WD is exempt from warranty issues one less year. That is worth money to them. Either get one, or don’t. Buyer’s decision.

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Well aren’t you pleasant. In a matter of a half hour you have made me regret joining this community. Your attitude filled post was not helpful in the least and is appreciated even less. Thanks. I hope there are a few others on here who would like to sincerely help fellow members and I would appreciate any other info that actually provides some knowledge about the products I am asking about. If anyone else can help at all, I would really appreciate it.

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I tell it like it truly is and you get huffy? I did not insult you or anything – or even insult the drive; I even said it was likely a good drive. Maybe no one has bought one yet, and even so, there is not a door into it to see what’s inside. You need to chill out, and understand the world a little better; especially the marketing of products.

Bottom line: It appears WD is trying to boost their profit line by re-branding some of their products and selling them in the Big Box stores of Best Buy. If price is a big factor to you, then buy it (since you say it is made by WD,) a reputable HD maker.

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I have asked the same question and after some research and comparing the specs it appears that the Easystorage has no built in encryption and password and that is why its slightly cheaper

I like password protecting my drive so I will stick with the passport

hope this helps

P.S. I registered just to give you an answer since there is no obvious answer anywhere
good luck

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Thank alot. I have noticed that as well. The Password protection and encryption appears to be missing from these models. At the same time, I have recently seen a few people on other sites mention that these models have WD Red drives in them which it seems may be better drives than the ones in the MB/PP. That would explain why the regular price of them is actually higher than the MB/PP. Thanks for taking the time and looking into this. Much appreciated.

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Even though the built in lock/unlock is not on this drive, you can still protect it. If you do not mind a little extra work, you can setup the hard drive to use StorageCrypt to protect it with encryption of data. The 7 Labs article “Lock external hard drive with password (USB Protection)” provides basic guidance and also provides a recommendation on a setup using 3 partitions on the drive. The 3 partition setup uses partitioning software, StorageCrypt and USB Copy Protection to setup a write protected general public partition (preventing malware from corrupting the drive), a second transfer partition for data exchange, and a private encrypted partition on the drive.

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Here is the problem mike and why the person asking the question is upset with you, and rightly so. You were kind of condescending with your answer and the irony of it is, you did not provided an answer at all. You used words like “probably”, 'maybe" and “it appears”, you basically were guessing why these drives were labeled that way. At no point did you provide any specifics or examples as to why the drive is different. “probably " is not going to cut it. The other two people after you actually provided concrete answers to this question. And to make matters worse, he politely told you that you were no help at all, because its the truth, and then you replied with more snarky commentary. he did not need to " chill out” or “understand the world better”. And then you finish with " then buy it ( since you say it is made by WD)", that tells me you didn’t even know who made the drive… it is you that is in the wrong here.

It is better to not answer a question if you really don’t know the answer. You were no help at all.

PS Awhispersecho I have the same drive… you can also use Windows Bitlocker to encrypt and add a password to the drive. Hope that helps.

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I know this is too late to help the user who asked this question, but I wanted to offer this info about the subject of Easystore for future viewers.

I was researching this subject for my own upcoming purchase decision and came across a site that I neglected to bookmark where some very techie users were talking about the internal hardware of the Easystore, which answers a lot of the questions popping up in this discussion about that recently introduced WD portable HDD. The users on that forum were obviously the “system admin” types who like to go beyond just the use, connectivity, quality, etc. of a piece of HW. They like to take it apart to use it for parts, re-purpose it, just for the fun of it, …

What they discovered when they took it apart was very eye opening about this supposedly “new” hardware. It’s not new at all, as some responders here surmised. All it is, according to these hardware savvy users, is a re-purposed internal WD HDD with the housing, connections, firmware, etc. needed to make it external and at least somewhat portable (although I would hesitate to move it much knowing the drive itself was never intended for that). This also explains the lack of encryption and password - as an internal drive, they would rely on the OS and networking software to cover them.

They were also discussing the latest change to the Easystore, that enabled them to lower the price as the asker noticed when shopping at Best Buy. According to these users (admins?), they found after opening the case that originally the Easystore housed a re-purposed WD red drive. Since the price of the Easystore was cheaper than the price of the internal red drive, they were cannibalizing the Easystore to get a cheaper internal red drive. Then WD replaced the red drive in the Easystore with a Green drive (a slower RPM blue drive if my memory serves me well) without the SATA connection needed to use it for an internal drive so they quit buying them for re-purposing back to their original use.

You can use this info or ignore it for your own purchase decisions, but it has led me to pass on the Easystore, regardless of price. I already have 2 Passports that I am very happy with, especially since I’ve lost about 5 TB of data due to other HDD crashes in the past 3-4 years. So that’s what I’m going with again this time! Far too many unreliable HDD’s that have cost me dearly in lost data and an unbelievable number of hours of recovery time on those HDD’s that I could use Recuva to recover at least part of the data from. But good news from the quarterly Backblaze HDD reliability reports - HDD average reliability across all brands, models, and sizes has improved dramatically over the past few years: “A total of 1,225 drives failed in 2016, which means the drive failure rate for 2016 was just 1.95 percent, a modest improvement over the 2.47 percent that died in 2015, and miles below the 6.39 percent that hit the garbage bin in 2014.”

Disclaimer: Please forgive me if I incorrectly reported this discussion I can’t find again - sorry 'bout that. I’m nowhere near their level of hardware expertise, so what I wrote is my best understanding of this group’s very techie discussion.

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I’ve been following this lately, as I was also puzzled why “EasyStore” drives weren’t visible on WD’s product websites (although they are present on the US support site), or non-US online retailers.
It’s indeed a Best-Buy proprietary offering; unlike the 4TB version, for the 8TB version, it appears to now always contain a WD Red SATA drive (intended for NAS storage, and retailing at $230-$270). Some early batches contained an even more expensive drive, a HGST (formerly Hitachi, now owned by WD) enterprise-grade 7200RPM drive. Therefore many people in need of NAS (home or business storage server) drives are buying them at BB, and “shucking” them for the bare drive.

Given current trends in cloud storage, WD doesn’t actually have a consumer grade (“Blue” or “Green”) drive at >4TB sizes and is unlikely to do so, explaining why they’re putting the Red drive in the 8TB Easystore; all their other 8+ TB drives are even more expensive (Red Pro for bigger NASes, Ae for enterprise, Gold for Datacenters etc.)

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Actually, about 90% of external hard drives are like this. They are almost all just regular internal hard drives that are installed into an appropriate enclosure that adapts the SATA data and power inputs to a USB connection.

This is nothing new. This is how it has always been.

The other 10% are still mostly just regular hard drives except that if you take them apart you will find that there is no adapter changing them from SATA to USB. They are factory designed to use a USB 3.0 micro B connector and the housing is only there to help protect it from impacts and for aesthetic purposes.

There are no technologies that somehow automagically make them more resilient to damage from bumps or or any other type of environmental abuse. And what you should take away, but clearly haven’t, from all those “system admin” types is the fact that regardless of whether your data is primarily stored on an external, internal, HDD, SSD, cloud, optical, M.2 or chiseled on a stone tablet, is the fact that if you don’t have a secondary copy of all your important files somewhere then you are at some point going to recieve a very hard life lesson about not doing so.

Regardless of what method of storage or what type of drive you use, it needs to be backed up, because there is no currently known storage media capable of offering indefinite reliability. If you need it, back it up somewhere. Or as we usually recommend, two somewheres, in case one of them just happens to also fail at the same time as the primary copy. Don’t frown, it happens.

And the backblaze data is worthless to the average consumer who does not use their hard drive in a manner consistent with the types of 24/7 use known to be used in the backblaze reports. They also use them in thermally different environments than the drive in the average users system will ever see. Their drives are also secured in incredibly solid inclosures and are unlikely to ever be bumped, jarred, banged, moved, dropped or any of the other damaging actions that most consumers subject their external, and in some cases internal, drives to. Their drives are also never moved while the drive is spinning and never see the potential for the kinds of damage to the heads or platters that a consumer’s might see because they are always cabineted.

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Hello…just curious what you ended up purchasing and how are you liking the one you chose? I have the same question you posted, hence my arrival at your post. So again…was wondering how things turned out…

It is a shame that your first post and encounter had to be so negative…I don’t know about you but on my first post I had this pop up:
“Does your reply improve the conversation in some way?
Be kind to your fellow community members.
Constructive criticism is welcome, but criticize ideas, not people.”
It then states it will only pop up on the first 2 posts…it appears that for some it should pop up every time. I read the response as you did…very condescending and rude. Why people have to be this way is beyond me…your question is a valid one…of course I would think this since it is also my question. Hopefully the rude person learned from this…but it unfortunately is highly unlikely…those types never seem to learn.
Thanks for your post…I’m still not sure which to purchase though…

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Hi.

I originally bought the 8TB My Book but it was making some noise that made me nervous so I took it back to exchange it and all they had left was the Easystore so I ended up getting an 8TB Easystore. It has been fine but I have never had any previous problems with WD drives so I’m not surprised this 1 is working good as well. I think they have made some changes to the Easystore drives lately though. It seems that they might have gone away from putting the Red drives in there and I even read a couple comments on Best Buy with people saying these are now repurposed or refurbished drives they are using. So, I’m really not sure which to recommend to you. I would go to Best Buy and read the reviews and the questions/comments on them. There are now 2 different models of the Easystore as well as the original My Book. In the future, I will probably stay with the My Book and Passport combination as that is what I have always used and I have a half dozen of them now.

As far as the comment and the experience at the forum. It is what it is. I haven’t been back there since and you are the 1st person I have even responded to. Good luck looking. If you want to follow up and ask any additional questions now or in the future, feel free to do so. WD drives have always been good and I won’t use any other brand so you should be fine either way. Of course I always buy 2 drives for everything I have backed up so I back up my backups. Better safe than sorry.

Good luck.

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Well said, Jose!

Selling a variant as a house brand is a good strategic move for WD to present options with minimal R&D OPEX. Perhaps what we all could benefit from while we try to “understand the world a little better” is that communicating fairly with others is more important than the cold information we believe puts us in a superior position.

Since I’m not above making myself look stupid to get the information I need from the right person, I’ll share a conversation I had with a tech at WD. This should provide the best answer for what we were looking for:

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I also signed up specifically so that I could respond to this question – or Mike’s answer. Thanks, Jose, for so clearly responding and explaining why both of Mike’s responses were totally unhelpful and snarky. My biggest pet peeve on any forum is when people respond “I don’t know, but blah blah blah” and provide no useful information. You are so correct that it’s better to just not answer.