# Cheap Western Digital 2Tb green drive



## eboydog (Mar 24, 2006)

Visted my local Staples today, picked up two 2tb Western Digital My Book Essential external drives for $71 each. According to what I can find online they have They have WD green 64mb cache drives in them, I believe the drive model is WD20EARS but I haven't torn mine apart yet as I'm using them for their intended purpose as external drives to do PC data backup. 

$71 appears to good esp considering you are getting a USB 3.0 external drive interface, note that the shelf price was higher and it wasn't until they pulled the drive from the back room, brought to the cash register and scanned it did it ring up at $71. This might be a fluke as I can't find this listed on Staples website for this cheap. I wasn't using any discount card or anything, I was tempted to buy the 3tb external but 2tb was all I need right now. 

Btw they also have 4tb drives but they may not have WD drives in them, the 3tb versions are reported to have WD drives. 

Note, the external drive has WD encryption, it may need to be low level formatted before using in your Tivo esp if you use it externally first, per online reports it appears no one can access data after installing it in their normal desktop PC using SATA.


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## CrashHD (Nov 10, 2006)

That's awesome. Any chance you can post an sku number so I can ask my local staples to price check, or a receipt scan for a possible pricematch?


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## eboydog (Mar 24, 2006)

CrashHD said:


> That's awesome. Any chance you can post an sku number so I can ask my local staples to price check, or a receipt scan for a possible pricematch?


Here ya go...


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## eboydog (Mar 24, 2006)

Sorry, it appears the pic didn't work BUT I just bought two more of these and the price is less than last week... I just paid* $51.50* for them!

Let me double check my DropBox folder so that the pic shows up correctly, again the *Western Digital 2tb My Essentials external drive is $51.50 * The clerk and assistant manager I spoke to couldn't explain low price other than it was a non-advertised close out.

<<Edit>> This is today's receipt, I bought one and then after seeing the price had them check and they had another so I bought the second one on a separate transaction.


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## HerronScott (Jan 1, 2002)

Darn, my local Staples didn't have any in stock. 

Scott


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## CrashHD (Nov 10, 2006)

Got two today at that price. Last two they had. No need to pricematch.

I brought in the receipt scan. They had to go to the computer, convert the UPC to the SKU to look it up in another computer, and they had two in back (not on the shelf).

If the enclosure was eSATA as well, it would be perfect for my needs, but still a great deal


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## eboydog (Mar 24, 2006)

CrashHD said:


> Got two today at that price. Last two they had. No need to pricematch.
> 
> I brought in the receipt scan. They had to go to the computer, convert the UPC to the SKU to look it up in another computer, and they had two in back (not on the shelf).
> 
> If the enclosure was eSATA as well, it would be perfect for my needs, but still a great deal


I tried the sata/USB adapter with a smaller WD drive I had laying around and I wasn't able to get my PC to access the drive, strange as the drive spun up but then spinned down when the PC tried to load the drivers for it . I believe there is a special partition loaded on the stock drive that identifies the controller to access the USB interface as there is procedure to load firmware on the drive should it become corrupt or locked due to a lost password.

Also ran across a possible hack to load firmware to the USB controller which has some hacking potential as it might be possible to make it believe it's a "my dvr extender" instead of a "my essential" external drive but aren't the WD dvr extenders a esata interface, not USB?

It would be nice to use it with smaller drives since it is a USB 3 interface. I might see what I can figure out with it, I didn't want to get sidetracked so I didn't pay a lot of attention to it, I accidentally hosed the partitions of my laptop drive while messing with one of these drives so on top of building a FreeNAS PC, I'm also reloading the OS on my laptop.


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