Lowest price within the last 30 days but not the lowest ever.
Mod Update 29/8: Price has dropped to $448
Mod Update 4/9: Back in stock, but price has increased to $452
CamelCamelCamel.
Western Digital AU will happily supply an AU plug for free. Or at least they have in the past.
yep, they not only did that, but sent actual AU power supplies, not just the AU plug. I've kept them on the off chance I get more drives from Amazon UK
Just got mine, no au adaptor
Just logged with WD so will hope they send
I’m surprised people buy them. What a pain if you have an issue covered by warranty.
Given that most people open them up anyway, I don't think they worry about warranty so much. I think it's just a calculated risk people take.
That’s why they buy from Amazon. AmAU is happy to refund or replace if it’s dead in the first year, and HDDs lifespan will be quite stable after a year of use. Also WD or Seagate will obey their warranty and willing to RMA after the first year. I tested my self (both methods, yeah I know, I have bad luck)
What I don’t get is why people are 1star the item because it comes with EU adapter knowing it’s an AmUK import. Isn’t this kind of drives are supposed to be shucked anyway? 😂
Thanks for the insight.
I assumed the warranty wouldn’t be accepted locally since it was a grey import and returns would have to be posted back to the UK.
There is no issue with the warranty.
I have shucked drives, had them fail, put them back into the original enclosure, boxed them up and done a return via Amazon AU.
Received a full refund.
The only annoying thing is waiting to receive the actual item, then knowing the serial number and registering with WD Australia for a AU plug. They're pretty responsive and good about it though only took 1 week.
People use the power plug? 😉
Yeah I bought 2 on that deal - ended up getting them free after a delayed delivery.
:O
Lucky. Missed out last time, as I couldn't decide if I should get it.
By the time I decided to get it, it was expired.
Been following the price since. Dropped from $800+ to ~$595 yesterday. Was hoping it drop to under $400 again for Black Friday/Cyber Monday.
How did you manage to get it for free with a delayed delivery?
The order was more than a week past the already generous delivery date and the tracking appeared to have stopped. Amazon asked me to wait further but eventually offered the refund without too much hassle. Drives turned up eventually.
Is it shuckable? And a good choice for NAS?
I'm running 6 in my NAS. Just finished swapping out the last 2 from the previous deal for my existing 8TB drives. Easy installation on my Synology, no mod or tape needed.
Need another 2 to complete the set, hence monitoring the price.
Thanks mate
What size drives are in it? 2 X 9TB or 3 X 6TB?
Pretty sure they cram 36 x 500gb flash drives in the case.
1x 18TB
Do you run docker on your synology? Did it get slower after upgrading to these HDD’s?
Don't run docker but my existing 8TB drive are Seagate SMRs (slow!) so I doubt these would have any negative affect.
FWIW I ordered 3 last sale and needed tape for 1
Edit: this is not in a Synology, but a custom nas (basically my old gaming pc)
best way to shuck them is with a thickish guitar pick, thinner than a credit/debit/loyalty card, and the point helps get it in the gap. Grab a couple from a music store or eBay
That last deal was nuts, this is an average deal …. surely we can do better
Exchange rate is not helping - these have been over $800 since the last deal so this is good unless you are prepared to wait.
Not bad, I think one of the lowest price for this drive in the past was $449 back in Nov 2021 and $434 in March 2021. So with inflation and the exchange rate, this is a reasonable price.
It was $384 less than 2 months ago.
Thanks. Bought one. Missed out on the $384 deal during prime day!
I have had a bad experience buying from Amazon UK. Last time, I bought a 14TB Elements and what arrived was a 6TB My Book! Prompty got it refunded and returned back to Amazon.
Anyone know if these are 7200rpm or artificially reduced to 5600rpm like lower capacity drives?
Google is suggesting to me that helium may last 5 years…hope you have backups!
Is this a helium drive?
The ones I bought via last OzB deal are indeed filled with Helium - confirmed in Hard Disk Sentinel.
hope you have backups
That's why most people set them up using RAID /s
Then the first question should not have been about backup but about redundancy.
RAID is specifically designed for a disk failure scenario - the one we talk about it here.
Backup and archiving is another story, irrespective of the disk health.
In 5 years we'll be upgrading to 30tb drives anyway
Best to check the MTBF rating of the drives in question. The enterprise drives tend to last a little longer than consumer drives (also tend to be a bit noisier)
I've had 8TB Red He drives for over 6 years, still going strong, no issues with them.
How to test these hard drives using macbook? Any software that helps ?
I also missed out on the $384 prime day deal. At the time I was debating whether I needed it but since then I've found that I do.
$454 (-$10 in gift card cash back) is only $60 difference from the previous deal.
For my situation I didn't want to wait several months to match the previous price.
Next time remember: Buy first, regret later :)
For the sub $400.
waiting for sub $400
price decreases from $454.93 to $448.00
why u tempt me in this way 🥺
why u tempt me in this way 🥺
Same here, just need it to drop to under $400, and I'll pick one up…
The 12TB's in my NAS seem so small all of a sudden…
Only 1 left in stock.
Nooo, was hoping it would drop further.
Update: changed to 'Usually dispatched within 2 to 3 days.'
Increased to $450.50
And out of stock.
16tb now works out to be pretty much the same dollar per tb.
When will there be something more than 18-20 TB ?
Not the best price ever, but $25 / tb seems to be generally considered a decent price
We're getting close to Black/Cyber days. I'd be holding out for the <$400 mark unless you desperately needed it.
November 25.. Almost 3 months is quite a while
Will be a blink of your eyes.
@CyrusL: 30's are the best.
Its the lightswitch age.
Still young enough to do stupid shit with your mates.
Old enough to be taken seriously when you switch on the serious face.
Win win.
@MasterScythe: I have a baby face so nobody takes me seriously. I'm 29 and I pulled a muscle in my back getting off the couch a few days ago. That was my first true "I'm getting old" moment. Still young, but old and fat enough for my body to start betraying me.
If I don't need it urgently then 25 Nov 23 is not many fa$ting days away ;)
Good point. I got a pair during the Prime sale and happy to wait.
It depends how many drives you need. The BF sales usually limit you to 3-5 drives which may or may not be enough depending on your needs.
I don't think I will be buying any more bare drives after what I received from amazon US a couple of days ago-
https://imgur.com/a/iCljwV2
From this deal- https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/720175
I discussed this in a recent thread and people initially tried to sht on the idea that there is much chance of things going wrong
I like to buy the 18tb and shuck purely because i know it comes in a plastic case with shock absorbent spacers so it won't float around in the box.
That's absolutely unacceptable!!!
While these External drives ship in a paper bag, the drive is mounted inside the enclosure using rubber absorbers, and the drive is held within a plastic frame within the box. I think this allows the drive to be well protected during transport.
Your bare drives are just unacceptable.
You're not wrong. They shipped a RAM stick in a paper bag with no protection. Amazed it didn't get snapped in transit.
They shipped a RAM stick in a paper bag with no protection. Amazed it didn't get snapped in transit.
They shipped me a WD SN750 in an envelope. No padding, no box. Just the bare drive.
I knew this was wrong, as I had previously bought the same model (different size) and it came in a box.
It was fortuitis though, as another retailer had the 1tb version on for a cracking deal just after I got this 512gb unit, so I sent it back (was always going to do this) and got the bigger drive.
@photonbuddy: They shipped a little cheap plastic object in a big Amazon box with airbag padding and gently carried it to my door yet they put my ram sticks in an envelope that a driver tossed over the fence onto a concrete courtyard when the gate was unlocked.
That seems fair, I would only buy the WD usb enclosed drives that come boxed with shock absorbers.
Also, buy from Amazon AU so if there are any warranty issues you dont have to send it back directly overseas yourself !
Pretty brutal, the worst I ever got from Amazon drive-wise was they just slapped a sticker on the retail box and sent it but at least the retail box has some cardboard spacers inside not to mention the protection afforded by the enclosure.
The drives themselves in theory should be able to handle quite a large impact (roughly 300Gs) assuming the heads have been parked properly but most dont feel comfortable testing that theory.
300gs is a 60cm drop, allowing the metal to deform like 0.2mm
0.2mm is all I'd suggest you'd want to take before being concerned with the deformation of the case. Yeah it's a guess but it feels right to me for that drop distance.
Point is: 300gs is not much at all. Likely to be exceeded if dropped without protection.
that is so funny considering that I usually receive my Amazon products triple boxed
Bought a WD red 6tb from Amazon AU, which was fine with the package: box with form that hold the driver pretty well. Maybe Amazon AU do a better job that Amazon US
Amazon AU workers have rights
Amazon US workers doesn't not
That's the difference.
@annarchon: They might not officially hire you as a temp at Amazon AU like they do in the US, but I have seen their AU permanent contract and I can tell you the wording was the closest thing I had ever seen to being offered a job as a casual while making it sound like you would be permanent, so that offer got sent to the trash. It was a specialist IT job also, not even a warehouse worker. Hate to think what their warehouse worker contracts look like …
@OzByte: They don't hire Warehouse directly, its through a temp agency. But even then the minimum conditions are still far better than the US.
It is crazy that when you buy a $3 jar of peanut butter, they wrap it in bubble wrap and padding for the box, but for super expensive HDD they just chuck them in loose.
Has anyone lately tested the 'call WD support and ask for the free AUS power adapter' trick ?
Have not heard for a long time if this trick still even works … I hate having to use the international adapters
It still works. I did that for the last 18tb deal, which took one or two weeks for the adapter to arrive after raising the ticket, as it was sent from Vietnam.
Yep, emailed them with serial numbers of 3 drives and said they didn't come with the right adapters even though I bought them on Amazon AU. No issues sent the adapters right away.
Yeah I've also done this on a few occasions. I've had the adaptors arrive quite promptly, and also quite slowly.
What am I missing here? Why entrust 18Tb of data on a single drive? If your data is important, wouldn’t you be better off paying for smaller separate drives to reduce the risk of one thing failing and everything disappearing?
Most folks either run them in a NAS with raid, or just keep a separate offline backup copy.
Essentially yes, you need to buy more than one, or you risk loosing massive amounts of data, but that has been true ever since the days of 8tb drives onwards imo.
I'm running a qnap with RAID for the last 5 years. Opened it yesterday and theres ransomware on it locking all files demanding 0.05 btc. (Deadbolt).
NAS has been nothing but trouble. Not user friendly, pain to update and now I find, exposed to virus and ransomware.
If I could do it again, I would use external drives X2 or go cloud.
Nobody does. I work in pairs to have backups
What am I missing here? Why entrust 18Tb of data on a single drive?
You're missing the fact that you don't entrust 18TB of data to a single drive.
You have multiple drives, and multiple backups !
Yeah that makes sense. I'd probably still have multiple smaller drives though. But I guess people want bang for buck and I don't have anywhere 18Tb of data to back up so different use case. My backup is under 500Gb.
I have this and when trying to transfer a large number of files at once (like photos) it lags and stops transferring. Seems to operate fine otherwise, not sure if the issue lies elsewhere but man it's annoying, especially as I am trying to backup a large number of image files.
Back in stock @ $437.54
Weird, they merged the threads last time
Back to $446.96 since 7pm AEST.
I am amazed Amazon sells these items to people outside the UK. The amount of 1-star reviews going on about how Amazon UK includes EU plug instead of Australian version is astounding. Stupid people.