Western Digital XE WD3001BKHG 300GB (2013) - Hard Drive Sounds

I know there's a lot of people here who have a greater preference for modern drives, so here's one for you! It's fitting that this video follows another WD 2.5" drive, yet being almost 2 decades newer.

These little things are more fun than I was expecting. A lot of WD's current enterprise options are HGST derived, so being able to use an enterprise-grade WD without any connection to the merger is quite nice.

I ran HD Tune as a benchmark, but it's a little mean given it's also the main drive in the system. I did it mostly for the sounds, so the clip has been cut into three parts for the most interesting sections.

I also found a really terrible USB to HDMI capture stick I once used in a project that turned out working decently for this video! This is only really usable for modern drives like this at the moment, but maybe I'll look into getting it working on my older machines too (the VGA to HDMI adapter I have stops working when a resolution change occurs....). It's a lot easier than pointing a terrible 15 year old camera at a screen.

I've posted some pictures here: https://bananahdd.nl/index.php/2024/0...
I'd like to write about the deeper specifications (& my own thoughts) covering these drives a bit more in the link above, but time doesn't allow it currently. I might be able to update this later. Sorry!

To be it bluntly, they're pretty cool drives! I have two of these, which both came from the same location, clearly given from their part number stickers (which have been removed). You can see pictures of the two of them in the link above, showing how close their serial numbers are too. They were both manufactured on the same day & have roughly 50k hours of run-time. Exceptionally loud for a 2.5" drive, like every other enterprise drive I've covered on this channel so far!

If you listen closely, you can also sometimes hear my array of Toshiba HDWG440's working away in the background... sorry about that!

Thanks for watching!

Chapters:
0:00 Startup & Spin-down
0:15 Windows Server 2008 R2 Demonstration
2:11 Startup (final)
2:31 HD Tune 2.55 Benchmark
3:23 File Transfer/Access
3:37 Spin-down (final)