Decent price .. Enjoy :)
Fast data transfers
High-capacity add-on storage
Plug-and-play ready for Windows PCs
WD quality inside and out
2-year manufacturer's limited warranty
CamelCamelCamel.
I'm looking to update to an 8/10tb external WD drive, I'm not urgent though, are prices likely to dip soon or is it a steady decline over time?
Pricing should have dropped a long time ago, but there's not a lot of bulk buyers so the price almost hasn't changed in a year.
They can be bought cheaper in the US, bestbuy stores get the 'easystore' versions, $160 USD for the 10tb etc. WD are making 12tb Easystore drives now, but the price for 8tb/10tb has increased, or stayed the same. YMMV.
Newer drives are more prone to picking up errors due to the increased density and different tech on the 'white label' drives, i.e. SMR or Helium, etc. my 3-4 year old 8tb's are starting to die now, so YMMV.
And, Seagate's 8tb/10-tb are still prone to failure & dying in warranty. You should really only get the higher density drives if you're going to put them in a RAID or NAS, which means buying a few drives and having 1 to 2 drives as 'dead weight', i.e. keeping integrity data in case a drive entirely dies, and you have to wait a week (or 6-12 months for a good deal) to replace it.
While you can retrofit an old / cheap computer with UnRAID or Linux/FreeNAS, and 5-10 hours over a weekend, Synology and QNAP do make it easier, for a price.
That said aren't the He10 drives usually found in the WD Elements more reliable?
https://www.storagereview.com/hgst_ultrastar_he10_10tb_enter…
can you rec a store that will ship to Aus?
If you look via Camel^3 above you'll see that they very gradually trend downwards, but it's very gradual - maybe $40 over a year. You'll also note that the sale prices over the year tend to remain constant.
Thus a good US sale is the time to buy, and import. The prices here don't have the same drive downwards.
how would the reliability of this compare to say a WD RED drive?
Edit: for external storage on a Blue iris CCTV server running 24/7… i'll have data written to SSD and once that is full, it'll mass-write data to USB so it's not technically writing 24/7 direct to this drive.
These are very similar to the WD Red drives. These drives are called WD White label drives if you want more info on them.
Edit: If you are using these externally then yeah these are basically the WD red drives, there's just a difference if you plan on shucking it and using it via sata
Blue Iris 4/5 doesn't need high capacity spin-rate unless you're running 10+ 4k cameras (sic), you can probably use portable USB 3.0 4tb drives, or get away with uploading to Google Drive File Stream as a tertiary backup if your upload speed is good enough.
What you probably want is a NAS, as the white-labels are not as reliable or have the same warranty as the Red/Purple series.
If you can record in h264, you might not need the WD Purple/Red drives, but, it depends if you need 24/7 capture for weeks/days at a time before archiving/off-site the video archives.
Thanks for that. I've actually got a NAS already… but whenever I try to enable WINDOWS network shares it tells me it cant use it otherwise it wont auto start when windows starts (which scares me)….
Waiting for 10TB to be on discount. 8TB used a mix of Helium and Air I believe
I have been burnt so badly with WD and their harddrives that I would not trust them again.
The price itself is not that good, I brought a Seagate 8TB Backup for about the same.
I was burned by Seagate. I've got an 8 disk raid 6, started off all Seagate disks. I've now got 3x WD red disks, 2x warranty returned seagate's and 3x of the original 3TB disks.
I've owned many hard drives over the years and had many fail, but Western Digital seem to last longer than Seagate. I've had brand new seagate drives give up the ghost.
But all hard drives can die, its just a fact of life.
Price is now $205.28
thanks.. :) this price deserve another post so shared it again :)
~$205 is a regular decent price drop, this price is what it is all the other times