If you’re still with us then I’m going to assume that you are a fellow datahoarder and are interested in shucking one of these WD drives to increase your NAS storage cheaply. If you just need an Easystore or Elements drive that you can use with your PS4, then again, this section is not relevant to you.
If you simply want to have a plug and play hard drive to dump your movies, music, and homework on then you can skip this section. In this category therefor, drives in both the Easystore and Elements ranges are a match. Of course, performance will be restricted to the speed of the old USB interface you’re using but it’s better than nothing. That said, USB is backward compatible, so if for some reason you’re working on an old computer with only USB2 (or even USB1!), you’ll still be able to use your WD drive. With capacities approaching 14TB, using anything slower than USB3 would mean needing days rather than hours to complete large data transfers. Years ago, when capacities were small it didn’t really matter if the drive had a USB1 or USB2 interface as you could copy the entire contents in a couple of hours.Īs you’d expect, with the high-capacity Easystore and Elements product range, USB3 comes as standard. 4) SpeedĪs hard drive capacities increase, the speed at which we can transfer data to and from them becomes all the more important. Western Digital has acknowledged in the past that the hardware encryption on some of their drives was weak and susceptible to attack so using BitLocker or Veracrypt is a good call, regardless of whether or not your drive has hardware encryption capability. This means that the CPU can perform AES encryption/decryption extremely efficiently. The vast majority of CPUs released in the past five years have been built with support for the AES-NI instruction set. In reality, you’re unlikely to notice any real-world performance impact. Technically, the encryption and decryption will be a little slower as your computer will be having to perform the task rather the drive itself. Although the Easystores don’t support hardware encryption there’s nothing stopping you from using something like BitLocker or VeraCrypt to keep your data safe. If you’re security-conscious and really want your data to be encrypted you may be thinking that the Easystore isn’t for you. At present, no WD Easystore drives support hardware encryption, according to this official document from Western Digital. Before data is written to disk, the chip encrypts it using the AES algorithm and likewise, after the encrypted data is read back from the disk, the same chip will decrypt it. What does this mean? Well basically, the drive’s controller has an onboard microchip capable of encrypting/decrypting data on the fly. The latest generation of WD Element drives support hardware encryption. If you don’t need your hard drive urgently, I would suggest you wait for the next Best Buy promotion and grab an Easystore when they’re on offer. At the time, it was impossible to find a 12TB Elements for anywhere near this price, making the Easystore the clear winner. For example, on Black Friday in 2019, Best Buy reduced the cost of the 12TB Easystore from $279.99 to just $179.99. The big advantage that the Easystore has though is that Best Buy will often run promotions, selling the Easystore at a big discount. For example, a 10TB Easystore will likely cost around the same as a 10TB Elements, and certainly within a margin of 10%. Generally, the cost of an Easystore and the cost of an Elements are fairly comparable. They can also be easily purchased online from any of the usual places (Amazon, eBay, NewEgg, etc).
They can be purchased through any Wester Digital distributor or VAR across the globe. Unlike the Easystore, the Elements range of drives is not exclusive to any one retailer, making them more widely available. Through another online retail platform such as Amazon.Online through the official Best Buy website.If you live in one of the above countries you’ll be able to purchase the Easystore in one of several ways: This means that the Easystore isn’t officially available outside of these countries, as the product is exclusive to Best Buy. Best Buy is a US firm trading in the USA, Canada, and Mexico.
To start with, the WD Easystore range of hard drives are only available through Best Buy. There are only minor differences between Easystore and Elements, but we’ll explore some of these in this article. They are often similarly priced and look almost identical, so you may well be wondering what their differences are and how they compare. These names refer to two popular and well-respected product lines from the company Western Digital (WD). If you’re in the market for some additional cheap data storage, you’ve probably heard the names Easystore and Elements.