With the coupon this price seems to be one of the best $/TB option for anyone looking to build a NAS with several drives for redundancy.
Before commenting, please note there are three tiers of WD Red drives:
This is therefore the middle tier, and the price is pretty good.
for the price i would get this - https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/product/B08J5SLTJX/
make sure the seller is an aus company to get the au plug.
Thank you. In this case, would it just be cheaper buying a drive that already has an enclosure i.e. Seagate etc.
Unlikely, most of the time the enclosured disks are lower in specifications. When you buy the disk like this you know exactly what you are getting.
Especially for cmr vs smr. I would much rather a wd plus/pro.
@garetz: Thank you, you've been very helpful. One last question, in terms of value would the 8TB in this deal be a better value? Or is it lower spec? https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/777459
@dottjt: The ironwolf is comparable to the red plus, so just depends on what you are willing to spend.
no no no, those external enclosed HDDs are usually low grade. this is so much better
buy 4 and put into a NAS
@shabaka: Sorry, I couldn't justify spending that much money on a NAS, but an external enclosure I could
@ebosh: Oh cool, thank you. I'll look into that, could probably spend that kind of money. Is the NUC really necessary?
@dottjt: The DAS doesn't have a CPU so you need a "computer" to organise and access the files on it, or act as the server. A raspberry pi would probably be fine. In my case I've got the DAS appearing as 4 separate drives in Windows, but I'm sure I could do more with it.
@dottjt: You need to buy two of these drives and two enclosures.
Otherwise how are your going to backup the data ?
@dottjt: No worries, just don't be too sad when one day the drive dies and takes all the data with it - all hard drives do this eventually 😎
I've got half a dozen of these very drives in a Synology DS1621+. Really happy with it…so responsive.
But that's a NAS as you say…quite a pricey initial investment.
You spend the money on a Synology DS1621+ then only populated it with 4tb disks ? Seems like you could of gotten a much cheaper nas.
Cheaper NAS for…capacity, or speed?
Depends what you want in a NAS. For my purposes, I wanted something that I could dump data to quickly, and I would be able to upgrade in the future. I'm into photography and video, and wanted the capability to edit straight to the NAS if desired. I'm not remotely pushing the capabilities of this atm, but I anticipate having it for a decade (like my last Synology, which is still going strong), and I want these capabilities.
Filling it with 4TB drives suited me initially. In dual parity it's performing very well. These drives don't cost an arm and a leg, and it gives me 14TB to play with (wayyyy above our high tide mark). I'd have loved to fill it with SSD's initially, but budget wouldn't allow for it.
Even with the Red Plus 4TB drives the speed at which I can get a large file to/from the NAS makes me very happy - and it's only on a gigabit ethernet connection (pretty much the ethernet is the bottleneck here atm…so faster drives won't help for pure sequential IO operations). In the future, I will be able to drop some SSD's into it, a 10gbe card, and edit video directly using the NAS. My teenage son (who is into media) will be able to do the same. If I want to, I can partition it off with a couple of SSD's for a workspace, and 4HDD's for storage. Many options with 6 bays.
I've also been messing about with VM's running on the NAS, which is a bit of fun, but not a requirement for me. Can be handy though if I want to test something on a Linux build - I pretty much live in Linux for my work.
I bought this for years to come. My last Synology is still running flawlessly after a decade or so, and I hope this one will last that long too - longer even better (depending on Synology support).
Usually I use something like this to keep them all cozy https://www.newegg.com/norco-rpc-4224/p/N82E16811219038
I bet you've got split ends .
red, redder, more redder but not reddest!
Red ones go faster!
can i use this as an external hard drive
Yes
do i need to buy additional stuff to be able to connect it to my pc via usb?
Yes any sata to usb adapter / enclosure
$29 / TB? Definitely not the best
true that $24/$25 /tb was about the norrm, below that was a deal.
It’s a red drive. Are you comparing apples to apples?
Being a red drive means nothing when the naming just obfuscates things. There's red, red plus and red pro, the first being smr which doesn't exactly point out 'quality'. It's purely marketing fluff trying to combine low cost and high cost products and trying to make them all seem higher end (cmr).
So smol though
This deal is only for EBAY PLUS MEMBERS only :(
This or the iromwolf? Both CMR and around the same price. Need to replace two of my NAS drives that are now reporting errors. Think there's 10% cashback via Shopback later today.
This!
https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/777605
Enterprise drive and much better quality and specs. Yes, it's expensive, but should last a long time. 5Yr warranty too.
Seagates are nosier. Just be aware of that, otherwise it’s about matching your requirements to the drive, capacity, speed, etc
Thanks. Missed out on the WD so ended up getting two of the ironwolf 4tb. Noise not an issue as the NAS is in a dedicated network room, under the staircase.
3 left now
Can someone please explain why this is a big deal? What's the application here? I see a drive with small capacity and nowhere near the speed of of SSD/NVME. Is it just because it's somewhat cheaper than usual and the reds are maybe more reliable? I would've thought NVME to be more reliable given the lack of mechanical bits.
Linux ISO's require a lot of storage and speed isn't important, only $/TB ;-)
I didn't know you can get a 4TB SSD/nvme for $116. These have ample speed for a NAS which is accessed by either gig network or wifi.
OOS
![[eBay Plus] WD Red Plus 4TB 3.5" HDD WD40EFPX $116.22 Delivered @ Computer Alliance eBay](https://files.ozbargain.com.au/n/97/777597.jpg?h=8c79b59e)
What enclosure do people use for this? I don't have a NAS, and I'm not sure I could justify the price for one.