Some nice prices on these drives, equal lowest ever for local stock of the 4TB WD Reds I believe. I've compiled all available sizes for reference, 4TB is the sweet spot for Price/TB.
| Capacity | Price (inc Del) | Price Per TB | Link |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1TB | $81.30 | $81.30 | 1TB |
| 2TB | $106.80 | $53.40 | 2TB |
| 3TB | $126.65 | $42.22 | 3TB |
| 4TB | $152.15 | $38.04 | 4TB |
| 6TB | $243.65 | $40.61 | 6TB |
| 8TB | $320.15 | $40.02 | 8TB |
| 10TB | $430.65 | $43.07 | 10TB |
Thanks to TA for original Computer Alliance 15% off Storewide @ eBay deal
10 ice creams!
We gonna get so fat and sassy.
Is this the same one but cheaper and free shipping or have I got something wrong?
https://www.amazon.com/Red-4TB-Hard-Disk-Drive/dp/B00EHBERSE…
I'm looking to buy four WD reds for a build in the future, but don't want to break the bank.
USD?
You linked Amazon US, which show US prices, has delivery charges to Australia (4TB works out to be US $134 ~AU$180 Delivered), and won't be covered under local Manufacturers warranty.
Cheers I knew I was missing something.
The amazon AU one is $189 and is actually sold by amazon so can claim $20 new customer for $169. Still dearer. What’s the warranty claims like for computer alliance?
I don't know about warranty claims, but I live locally to them and their service is always excellent.
How do these compare to my all time favourite mass storage
Seagate Expansion 8TB Desktop External Hard Drive USB 3.0 (STEB8000100)
https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Expansion-Desktop-External-ST…
$159.99 USD plus $12.32 USD shipping for me.
$240.39 AUD total for me for 8 terabytes or about $30 AUD per terabyte.
Can't beat this deal imho.. Best I have seen was maybe $20 AUD per terabyte in a one off Australia post deal for like 2 terabyte external hard drives.
These are red drives, not run of the mill green/blue
Can explain further. That means not much to me right now sorry.
Basically NAS drives are designed to be able handle the workload required for constant usage, making it ideal for servers where you need to write data 24/7, hence the higher cost compared to traditional drives. The expansion desktop drive you linked has been under $200 before from Amazon, but it's likely we won't see that again for a while as GST starts getting hammered on after 1 July.
Well, I guess there wouldn't be any issues using it for gaming, but there's been cheaper deals in the past on non-NAS HDDs that would work just as well.
Would be a poor choice for gaming, they're designed for server storage, 5400rpm, relatively low power consumption and reliability.
Nope, you'd want a 7200rpm drive for that for better performance.
These Red drives are fantasic for NAS systems or for using as backups at home and small office situations. I'm looking at getting 2 and putting them in a RAID 1 configuration.
@lyl:
Not really looking to a server or anything. But would this be good for surveillance purposes? I want to use a reliable hdd for my house CCTV
@montorola: The WD Purples are specifically designed for surveillance, and are designed to support 24/7 recording for up to 64 cameras.
If your needs aren't that great (ie if you don't have too many cameras or need super high reliability) then a Red should be adequate. I've personally been using an old Green for 24/7 surveillance recording for years with a few cameras. The Greens certainly aren't designed for it but it still hasn't died yet. My needs aren't critical so when it eventually dies I'll probably replace it with a Red.
Thanks particle!
I'm definitely not using it for 64 cameras haha, just 4, so I think I'll chuck in a Red and see how it goes. Cheers mate
They are very noisy when being accessed - heads moving make a thump/click noise - I had my DS916+ with 4 x 4Gb Reds in a storage room near my bedroom - had to move it next morning as too much noise!
@RedHab:
Did a search for "noise" on Amazon reviews, most reviewers said they had little to no noise at all
These have longer warranty and designed to run 24/7
Between my brother and I, we have 2x 4bay NAS with the 4TB WD reds in each one. Over 5 years, 3 out of 8 drives have failed (1 from mine, 2 from his). 2 of them were purchased in the last 3 years as we never had them all filled up from the beginning. All purchased from different suppliers and located in different areas/countries. I'm switching to Seagate now… I've lost confidence in the WD Reds.
That failure rate really doesn't sound that high for 5 years…
are you moving your NAS around etc? do you scrub your drives once a month?
Nope, they both haven't moved around. No scrubbing either. Not even very high usage on them. One of them is purely to backup photos every now and again, but they are left on 24/7 which they are suppose to be. Mine sits in a well ventilated area. We stuck a Seagate Ironwolf NAS drive and it runs at 36 degrees over 40 degrees which the WD runs at. These drives operating temps are meant to be between 0 and 65 degrees. So its no where near the higher side. I've always assume they will fail over time, but having 3 out of 8 just felt a bit high for me.
Oh and another thing, the WD warranty process was reasonably straight forward. Although you have to send the drive to Vietnam for Asia Pacific region. You can organise them to send Fed Ex to pick up at their expense which I thought was pretty good. But I had to ask for this to happen. A replacement drive came in a week. So if it's covered under warranty, the process was good.
do you scrub your drives once a month?
What does this mean?
That's odd. I have a mix of ten WD Red drives in a server, they've been running for ~five years 24/7 now without any issues.
They are all air cooled though, so maybe heat inside your NAS may have been an issue?
Thanks for tabulating prices, looks like a good deal. I just bought the 8TB from futu for around $328. This is good if you can consolidate shipping with other items too.
By the way the 4Tb might be best $/Tb, but don't forget about future expansion: if you fill up all the SATA slots on your motherboard, it is annoying to get an addon SATA card, or otherwise have to remove smaller drives and lose storage. Thats why I went for 8Tb.
Thanks again!
It should all be free delivery if you use the eBay Plus trial
So with eBay plus, who is actually paying for the shipping? You guys or eBay? I mean, say if $15 per item and the eBay Plus cost $49 per annum, if I were to buy more than 3 items on 3 separate transactions, whose covering beyond that?
It would be ebay. It's eBay's program. Subscription postage service, like amazon (or Catch). "Me too!"
I sure won't be subscribing. eBay is not cheap enough for me to buy more than one item per month, with 80% of those offering in-store pickup or coming from china with free shipping.
I've never had burner or multiple accounts for vouchers etc, but it might be time to set that up for the remaining 20% of my purchases. After all, I don't need good feedback to be a buyer on ebay.
We still pay for the actual shipping, so no difference from our end, but they do reimburse the buyers. Essentially eBay are paying for the freight. I guess that is why eBay are limiting availability of that program. Suppliers charging excessive freight won't be included.
The basic idea from their perspective is to encourage frequent ordering with the sellers perhaps making a few extra sales, the buyer getting a better deal, and eBay collecting extra fees from the improved revenue.
I like it, its a smart idea relative to some of the deals they do, is cost effective to build their marketsplace, and doesn't have some of the negatives that happen with other marketing ideas they use.
Can anyone recommend and nas sytem to pair with these drives I have alot of photos to backup!
I use synology ds918+. Good unit and the user interface is very straight forward and easy to use. Though they are pricey.
It frustrates me that it's a 4 bay system though. Really need a 5th bay for the parity drive. Otherwise, using reds (good size/price ratio), 24tb isn't a lot of space for the outlay.
10tb drives would be OK for space but gets expensive at $43/tb when you compare it to shucking 8tb externals at $31/tb (there really isn't much point to paying $40/tb for bare drives like in this post). Shuckers like me already have plenty of 8tb red's lying around too.
Just installed FreeNAS on a spare computer I had. Working nicely so far but does require some technical background.
Qnap and Synology are great. I’d avoid drobo as they are over priced and use a proprietary mechanism for the underlying raid. If you want to save money and don’t need fancy software plugins you can pick up net gear seagate or WD units pretty cheaply on eBay etc.
I don't have experience with NAS systems but have you considered an online service for backing up your photos?
Just have way to many and also most are raw files which are too large
Use something like Carbonite that offers unlimited storage for a reasonable price. I use FreeNAS but I also backup 400GB of photos to Carbonite because a NAS doesn't protect you all that much.
@grumpybum: Yeah agreed. Even Google Photos etc aren’t too extra really even if you need the paid plan. If you have a fire it’s best to have them off premises.
If you’re happy to lose the RAWs from memory Google Photos storage is free for up to 18MP or so, so you could resize and upload to a free account. Not ideal but beats losing everything.
For home I built my own. Was looking at Synology and they seemed relatively expensive but otherwise good options.
For ours I got a LIan-Li Q25 case which is a m-itx sized case that takes 5 x 3.5" drives in a HDD bay as well as either an additional 2x 3.5" on the base of the case or 3 x 2.5". Also used an mSata drive for the OS which in turn takes up no bays since its connected to the motherboard. So internally without creating space I can fit 9 drives, and being a standard PC I can connect another external per USB port or use hubs.
For mine I run Windows 10 so I can run various other services such as Plex, HomeAssistant etc. and use StableBit DrivePool (https://stablebit.com/) to do drive replication and pooling to a single large drive. Our only other systems are super old Macs too so a decent spec home server allows me to do some things remotely that my laptops might struggle with. I also had a lot of 2TB drives from old systems that I wouldn't want to throw in a dedicated NAS as the storage would have been limiting, but a PC with heaps of bays allows me to use them in addition to newer larger drives. Depending on the need you could use Linix or go an OS designed for NAS use like FreeNAS.
So yeah, for simplicity I'd go Synology but if you want the ability to keep adding drives and repurposing all those old 2TB ones sitting about, then I like the custom approach with a case that'll accomodate the storage.
Thanks OP! Any deals on the WD Purple hard drives?
Any deals on the Black (4TB)?
Are the 8TB MyBook's still containing red drives? I shucked one last year and it had a red in it and it's a fair bit cheaper than just buying the drive.
I thought they were white labelled drives that, for whatever reason, people thought were red drives with a white label. I'm repeating what I read in a comment on OzB.
I got my red's from 8tb MyBook Duos, which advertise the internal drives as reds, a long time ago. So I don't have direct/recent experience with the single drive enclosures.
I bought one about 12 months ago and at that time it was a white label but it's a red model number.
A good deal. It might be worth stearing away from the 3TB models though, as their reliability may be suspect:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-failure-stats-q2-2…
Agree. Myself and friend both had catastrophic failures with these.
Picked up 4 x 8TB's for $305.15 each (free shipping with Plus). Was going to buy smaller capacity but heeded @wozwozwoz's advice about future capacity. Best to be sure.
Honestly, I would just shuck 8tb externals at $31/tb. Buy from Amazon US and do it before GST/shipping changes.
Pepperidge farm remembers when 80GB WD800JB drives were just over $1 per gig.
Aside from noise is there any downside to using these in just a normal everyday pc?
No real downsides, they are 5400rpm, so they're not ideal for gaming or scratch disks.
As for noise, I have a mix of 3TB and 4TB Red drives (ten in total) in a server behind me, I can't hear them running.
4TB Ironwolf are at a historical low as well
https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/4TB-Seagate-3-5-5900rpm-SATA-IronWolf-NAS-HDD-PN-ST4000VN008
Legend, cheers for that.
The WDs just sold out. So I purchased these instead. Any idea on differences between these and the reds?
The main difference is the Ironwolf's are 5900RPM, whereas the Red's are 5400RPM.
Other then that it's mostly personal preference/brand bias on which you buy. They have the same warranty length and feature set.
Hopefully they're not that seagate 4TB drive with the 30% failure rate lol:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-failure-stats-q2-2…
Those are their desktop SShd and barracuda drives.
They are desktop drives (Barracudas). No idea why Backblaze doesn't use Ironwolf's.
Also, that seems like a bit of an outlier from the small sample size, updated stats from Q1 2018 show failure rate back within acceptable limits.
The reds I've had have been great currently run 12 of the 4tb (WDC WD40EFRX-68WT0N0) and 3 of the 8tb (WDC WD80EFZX-68UW8N0) only 1 of the 4tb drives died in the three odd years they have been running nearly (24/7) . RMA directly with WD was 2 week turn around.
I would however move to Hitachi 8-10TB SAS disks in a heartbeat if I could afford it (need to buy an new server this year). All my gear has SAS/SATA midplanes along with the HBA's
If you want low cost low power drives for a reasonable amount of storage then the red's are the go. If you want that storage to perform better look elsewhere
Well damn, 4tb out of stock
Any good deals on a Synology NAS?
Just a heads up.
We are nearly out of our stock of the 4TB.
We have ordered a large extra batch and I will keep them up on eBay anyway whule waiting on that shipment, though orders from later today will take a extra day or 2 to ship.
As we sell out of the in stock batch, we will probably remove the free freight for the new stock — though I suggest you take advantage of the ebayPlus deal to gain free freight in any case
…Adam
Sorry about that, the 4TBs went off automatically when we ran out. Have pushed some hundreds more back up there, thats some of the new stock on its way to us but we can't physically ship till they arrive in a day or 2.
Have removed the free freight on that model for the new stock - but i suggest try using eBayPlus to cover that.
It's worth noting here that the drives with the more expensive $ per GB generally have a better cache.
The 8TB has 128MB and the 10TB has a 256MB cache.
That makes 4, 8 and 10 the best choices given your circumstances and requirements.
Caved and bought 4x 4TB. Paid AU$608.60, Saving AU$107.40 from coupon and grabbed free delivery from eBayPlus trial.
Quick update — As i mentioned, we pushed up some stock on ebay that we were low or out of stock of after ordering a large new batch that will cover new orders.
I'm told that shipment did not get out of the distributor today; maybe we should have ordered less pallets of drives to make it easier! Earliest some of those orders will ship is Wednesday, and that depends on when they arrive vrs last courier going out for the day. Still should be most places by end of the week, but don't worry if you don't see shipping advice tomorrow.
One of two large batches of WDs expected just came in. Unfortunately the last courier pickup for today is happening as those are being receipted in, so they won't go out today.
There are not enough 4TBs in this batch to cover all current orders, but will prioritise any older orders needing them so they should all go out in the morning. A large number of additional 4TB due with tomorrows batch that will catch us up. They are off eBay for now, but will be back on probably tomorrow afternoon.
There are enough 8TBs and I think all other models to cover all current orders, so they will be packed tonight to go out tomorrow (the ones that haven't alreday gone, we have shipped 100s of drives in many SKUs already, 1000s overall)
Should have never bought all those drives in the other sale. Could have saved me $5 bucks! That's enough to take the other half out for ice-cream!