Best fit for a 4TB WD HDD and a SATA-III USB 3.0 enclosure?

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dusf

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Jan 17, 2012
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Hi

I want to purchase a large capacity drive for media and I want to use it in a hard drive enclosure as to initially hook it up to our Samsung LED TV that supports all the codecs I have thrown at it so far. I plan on buying an internal and enclosing it rather than an external so that I would be able to fit the HDD into a PC in future should I choose to.

Amazon stock this:

WD 3.5 inch 4TB Internal Hard Drive with PCI Express HBA Card - Green

..but searching Amazon by the model name WD40EZRX they have another listing of it at a slightly different price without the PCI-E card:

WESTERN DIGITAL WD40EZRX HDD Caviar GRN 4TB 3.5 SATA 6Gbs 64MB - (Components Internal Hard Drives)

Are they the exact same drive? Am I safe to go with the first one and receive the PCI-E card in case I ever want to run WIN XP? I use Windows 8 and Ubuntu at the moment.

Can you please also recommend an enclosure that supports 4TB, SATA-III, USB 3.0? I am not sure the WD40EZRX can transfer fast enough to fully utilize these technologies, but it would be nice to have an enclosure that could offer future HDDs that facility. I nearly ordered one that only supports up to 2TB.
 
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DarkSable

DarkSable

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Sep 27, 2012
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You plan on buying an internal and enclosing it rather than an external so you could put it in a pc in the future if you want to? You do realize that there isn't anything special or different about the drives in external enclosures, right?

Just buy yourself a 4TB external drive for cheaper, and then you can open it up and put the drive in a computer just fine if you ever want to.

You wouldn't have the PCIe card, but really, that's kinda pointless; you should not be running XP at this point, as it is incredibly insecure, and will only grow more so.

Also no, you don't need SATA III, are you kidding me? No future hard drive will be able to saturate it; it takes several hard drives in RAID 0 to saturate the bandwidth of a SATA II controller. The only reason SATA III would be good is for SSDs, but it's going to be heavily bottlenecked by being on USB anyways.
 
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giantbucket

giantbucket

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Nov 17, 2013
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buy whichever is cheapest. sometimes for weird reasons the external ones are cheaper by a good $20. the guts inside are the same - there's videos of people cracking open a Seagate to use the drive and pocket the $20.

as to enclosures, ANY SATA enclosure is fine, even SATA1 (which is 150MB/s, which is what current fast Seagate drives are sometimes capable of saturating). it would take 4 current-day HDDs in parallel going full-tilt to saturate a SATA3 interface. ok, if you get really lucky, just 3 HDDs would saturate it. that's 3-4 drives all feeding into the SAME interface.
 
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