Can I use any 3.5″ WD Gold HDD drive in an external enclosure

WD Gold HDDs

Hi, I am confused about something.

I am interested in using a WD Gold 4TB drive in an external hard drive enclosure to back up my data from my PC. I thought these would be best in class for this purpose. I thought they might be better than the SeaGate Iron Wolfs.

I called Western Digital to ask about this and they told me they don’t recommend the Gold’s for external hard drives, only for servers. They wouldn’t provide warranty for external drive use either.

I always thought you could use any 3.5″ drive in an external enclosure. Is this not the case? If not, why not?
What is so special about the WD Golds that they can’t be used in an external HDD enclosure?

Thanks for any light you could shed on this.

Surely you can use any drive in an external enclosure. Just make sure you have enough power delivered toa drive. You will find 2.5inch laptop type of drives in USB enclosures because they need so little power that they can run via USB cable or Thunderbolt.

Powering 3.5″ drives require additional power. You will often find these enclosures with USB + Power cord.

And finally, 3.5-inch drives generate more noise then 2.5inch. For that reason, people do not use them unless they live in some hard plastic enclosure which absorbs some noise.

I hope this helps.

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