An OzBargain favourite pull is back in stock, current FX rate makes it $269 delivered (post likely via FedEx). Making no promises but I have been happy with my purchases from East Digital and unlike many retailers they are not price gouging and disguising it as poor AUD.
Model: WUH721816ALE6L4
A good clean used enterprise drive will outlast a retail drive.
A good clean used enterprise drive will outlast a retail drive.
do you have proof ?
also do you do this to your hard disk?
I am not sure if my millionth 4K copy of 300 the movie that’s obtained through certain means, and can be obtained again at will is “more precious” than this hard drive.
Though in the past I down voted ED posts due to the age of the drive East digital told me. But these days, these are probably priced most aggressively compared to the FR ones. My downvotes were based on FR drives being slight more expensive than a 3-4 year old used drive.
Though, I’d STILL advise against buying drives right now as the prices overall are absolutely ridiculous.
HDDs hit floor price before the Thailand floods, they aren't going to get significantly cheaper ever again, there is no business case for building more capacity.
You will be waiting for SSDs to get cheaper than this.
Unless you are talking about AUD appreciating?
A bit of both. Right now I believe due to demand from AI training making the demand sky rocket and trade wars aren’t helping.Maybe they are trying to average the costs in an attempt to discount the US sales. I believe second hand drive sales have been boosted by pretty much or tech influencers being paid to advertise sellers like server parts deals.
But either way, there is no reason, outside of inflation, they won’t go down to their previous prices in the future. It was profitable then, it can be profitable now. There is just a lot of demand right now. Hence I can see these going down in the future. Obviously I don’t know that, and how near is that future even if that happens, I am not sure. Either way, if you have the means, I think it’s good to wait a bit.
@Larsson: The big factor is there is almost a duopoly in HDDs now, very little competition so no reason to compete on price or features.
That's not exactly true.
The next generation of hard disks are now well into production and offer comparable performance to low end (SATA) SSDs for throughput (not IOPS!) and much larger capacities for dollars (e.g 30T/40T -> 100T drives).
It's perhaps possible for a home user to build a 4/8/10/16T SSD only storage solution for home but when you get past that, you're back to HDDs (and demand continues in the enterprise space which is where the investment is coming from to build more capacity).
Google's Colossus arrays (filesystem) are an example of that now - these are in the multi-exabyte range and the majority of that is spinning disk.
I've been following pricing for a few years now and HDD storage is around ~$20-25/T while SSD storage is ~3x-4x that.
@jason andrade: The source of the prediction appears to be this startup
https://www.purestorage.com/resources/all-flash-data-center-…
SSD storage is 4x the cost of HDD storage - today, if there is price parity in 5 years the industry is not going to invest in more HDD supply, unless it can be done cheaply without significant investment (SMR at higher density?)
Perhaps the exact year needs to be taken with a grain of salt, the general premise is that the price of SSD storage is falling much quicker than HDD storage, which seems true.
@[Deactivated]: I'd agree that SSDs are around 4x HDD - and I'd also agree that the price is going to keep falling (it was 5x not that long ago and 10x before than and so on..)
However it's going to be quite some time before there's parity (and I don't know if 5 years is realistic).
There's also a gulf between chip manufacturing investment (leading to SSD price reductions) and manufacturers looking at their returns and refusing to drop prices past a floor. The investment required to make these chips is huge and if they aren't making enough of a return that's a big problem in terms of the source of future investment.
I've been a big proponent of SSD storage in the enterprise (and in a lot of enterprise DCs, there are now "all flash" arrays with no spinning disk at all). However there's still a clear disconnect between the costs of how vendors are pricing their products vs the underlying costs of the respective storage..
Seagate, WD etc are see no slowdown in growth/demand for their spinning rust products and continue to invest - not just in production but in R&D.
If you don't have backups, then the data can't be too precious.
++ If it’s not a verified backup, it’s not a backup
used HDD can be put in NAS, setup RAIDx for redundancy and extra backups if needed.
Or just simply used for the surveillance mointoring stroage and wouldnt care too much about the data itself if lost.
I never understand the point of buying a used hard drive.
So you are saying you don't understand the point of redundancy and backup of such precious data?
We use hard drive to store data and Data is more precious then hard drive itself.
Which is why most of us have multiple copies across multiple drives … unsure about the longevity of these drives, then just have an extra copy of the data ;)
The most likely time a HDD fails is within a week of deployment, meaning that drives that make it past that likely also have a few more years in them :/
I have 16 refurb drives so far, none have failed in 18 months, but even if they do RAID redundancy with spares ready to go mitigates a lot of the perceived "risk" ;)
Hdd's are consumables. Expect them to die, just because it's brand new doesn't mean it'll last longer than a used enterprise drive.
Data is precious, that's why you buy used drives for half the price and store your cat pictures on 2-3 different drives
My drive arrived faster to my door than most local retailers have even packed my orders. Their shipping speed is unmatched.
Got one from last deal, did preclear with unraid and passed all tests.
I had 27K hours, but others had a bit less.
$16.81/TB
If wish i can get the same 16/tb but for 8 or 10tb drives… i need 3 and cant afford $269x3 (and dont need that many TB)
Just buy two 16TB on RAID1. Same capacity and redundancy with 3x8TB on RAID5 and better performance.
Wow you are right it has same capacity (14.5tb) Didnt think that. But now i have total 10tb at 82% so probably 14.5 wont last long before i hit 80% again… oh no….
@McMaferMur: Ha! But I'm on 8x12TB on RAID6 about to hit the ceiling so had to consider 18TB and more per drive… yeah…
Be aware although RAID1 can be converted to RAID5 (then RAID6) but I'm not a fan of rebuild on whole-array swaps.
This may give you some hints: https://www.ozbargain.com.au/comment/16433538/redir
Finally, you can run two NASs - buy a new NAS (probably be more performant) with new drives for all data and add snapshots for extra protection, then do nightly backup to old NAS with old drives. Now you're one step closer to the 3-2-1 strategy.
@xmagic: Hmm thanks ill think about it. Yeah if i upgrade the hdd the old ones will have no use so why not keep using them.
That way i can just get 1x16tb and run it without protection!
@McMaferMur: That's another way to do it. Buy a 3-5 bay one and add drives along the way. After all RAID is not a backup!
Though I personally would always prefer used drives on RAID for uptime. Restore from backup still takes time.
@xmagic: Thanks. I really need to re thinking my plan, previously i thought i can sell my 13 years old synology when im upgrading. Probably no 1 will buy it lol….
1 year warranty vs 3 years on some other models they have.
From what I can see they provide 1 year for server pulls and 3 years for factory recertified. I can confirm that they do honour the warranty. Had a factory recertified drive die on me after a week and they provided me with a refund after sending I sent it back (Australian PO Box) at my own expense.
How much the shipping cost ? Its still a loss for customer.. hmm..
Had a factory recertified drive die on me after a week and they provided me with a refund after sending I sent it back (Australian PO Box) at my own expense.
shouldn't the return shipping be covered by them for a faulty drive?
seems like it is still a loss based on what your shipping cost was, and not sure if you had to add insurance + signature confirmation etc..
Thanks OP. I was keeping an eye out for one. Ordered!
sheesh what will I do with 16tb
linux ISOs
Nice find. I bought the exact same used drives from a different seller on Amazon. Got 2 drives. One worked perfectly. The other one failed 1 hour after spinning it up (after SMART tests had passed). Is any testing performed prior to sale? Also how well are these packed - couriers can be blasé sometimes.
East Digital are known for packing drives really well. I had 16,000 hours on my last purchase from them. It depends on your OS and tools available; I prefer something like an Unraid preclear where all sectors are read and written to and the drive is put through its paces for a few days before writing to it.
Good idea. Will do that next order.
Any free tools you could recommend for Windows 10 please?
Linux
@Cheehoo: Not sure why Linux being downvoted. badblocks on Linux is indeed the a very reliable way to both sweep and stress test a drive.
There's no need to actually install Linux for this. Just boot to a Live environment like Ubuntu or GParted Live.
how many hrs uptime are the drives reported as when you checked?
also does hdd software show any info about bad values / sectors or CRC errors in SMART?
Having bought hdds from both East digital and Amazon (metrocom), the east digital ones are packed much better. Metrocom rely on bubble wrap, whereas East digital have a foam block with a hdd shaped slot to place the drive in.
1 year warranty why would you bother mate?
We used to rely on Amazon US/DE shucked drives. Also one year warranty, and much higher price per TB
Yeah, reason why I bought brand new Exos drives from local stores - 5 years warranty. Good peace of mind.
How about the 14TB HC530?
https://east-digital.myshopify.com/products/wd-ultrastar-wuh…
$220
Cheaper per TB.
That looks like a damn good deal!
And definitely better than this if you specifically need more drives (for redundancy purposes) than this deal.
14tb OOS
Thanks, grabbed one for my UDM Pro, going to hook up some cameras soon.
Sold out?
Yeah sold out just I was about to pull the trigger. Ended up getting the 14TB instead.
The 14T as opposed to the 18T? I figured a lot of people go up rather than down :-)
Please stop posting this so it can finally be cheaper.
No it won’t. It’s already great ED didn’t jack up the prices on pulls. The price on FR drives were significantly jacked up after last deal I posted. But I assume it has something to do with forex and trump tariff, not popularity.
I've never purchased a used hard drive before, hoping for some advice please - are these 'server pull' drives generally regarded as preferable to the "factory recertified" Seagate drives that East Digital also sell?
(I notice that the latter ones come with a 3-year warranty, as opposed to 1 year…)
Hard drives are always a gamble but there is so much drama with Seagate that I would always stick with WD, even if it’s a pull.
Yup ED pulls are less warranted than FR drives. Same policy on server part deals. Likely due to MTBF in reality and lack of OEM back it up.
FR drives often comes with less hardware wears (as many are from RMAs) and are all gone through the same testing at factory as new drives, likely fully scanned and new firmware. Also likely all from different batches originally which some say it’s less susceptible to multiple failures at the same time, if you buy into such theory.
As of pulls, as long as they’re not from mining use and are on adequate hours they shall be a very cheap option considering data are backed up and on redundancy.
How are these for say a reolink NVR for CCTV
Wanted to ask same question, I think 16tb might be a bit too much though. I recall 14TB might be the max size for reolink? Also heard that a big HDD like this may make streaming/playback speed a lot slower?
Think I might get this WD Purple 6TB, I got it down to $184 using code AFAU30
aliexpress.com/item/1005007164220695.html
If capacity is the issue here, I have 20TB on my 9-camera UniFi Protect setup. More than an entire season worth of playback. No degradation on performance. Local police officer was impressed. 🤣
They seek fairly quickly, but for long term use and if you were buying a new drive there are specialist NVR/surveillance drives like the WD Purple or Seagate Surveillance which are designed for long term slow steady writing
and by "designed for" he means… a few things changed in the firmware and marketing fluff put on the box and a price rise for the "Surveillance" monica.
@buffalo bill: Why? And you didn't make it clear if you're referring to Google's AI results or an actual result from the search engine.. which in turn isn't Google's opinion.
@HercalloY is basically correct..
saw this in the morning when i was just checking for higher capacity drives but didn't think it was a good deal being refurbished/used. But votes on this post says otherwise!
PS: my reference was buying 'new' 16TB exos with 3 years warranty for about the same price last year.
ED’s FR drives prices are all hiked from ~$20/TB to >$25/TB in the last weeks. They’re still indeed the cheapest on the market but I think they’re overpriced as $25/TB is usually what I would pay for brand new drives.
I've been waiting for this but it's sold out again dang.
Dang, missed the party.
How can we get updates on restocks and new product drops on ED? The goat hdd sellers
Got a 16tb few weeks ago for my unraid (amazon deal). Working well for parity drive. I see ED got the 18tb for $320 $17.88/TB. Is that considered good? Not really up to date with hdd prices.
It's not bad!
The 16T came in at $16.88/Terabyte.
The 18T is $17.94/Terabyte.
This is 6.2% more expensive (per Terabyte) for the 18T drive but you get 12.5% more capacity in the same form factor.
And it's only $53 more.
Anything under $25/Terabyte is pretty good - which is around the benchmark for a new (external) disk (>20T).
Thanks, ordered a 18. Now have to rebuild again as gonna be the biggest parity (unraid) First world problems lol. Also clean up my qnap storage.
Yeah I just bit the bullet and ordered 2x18TB to upgrade 2x8TB.
Going to go through a painful process of transferring 16TB of data off my 2x8TB RAID10, re-build it as a SHR RAID with the 2x18TB then transfer everything back. Hoping I don't mess it (or my Plex library) up…!
@Madrical Also got most as Plex.few VM's. I use unraid now and liking it. Added watchlistarr and few other Docker to manage PLEX. Example when i put a movie or tv show in watchlist on plex it downloads it with my Usenet and puts it where it should go. When new episode out it downloads it automatic. Almost like a rss feed
Wow thats my dream setup automated download. Can i do those all with torrent instead usenet?
@McMaferMur: Cannot see why not. Haven't gone down that path as this seems more "legit" and guess bit less dodgy downloads. Not sure the setup for that way is. I can also put upcoming movies. I chose good quality ones and skipping screeners. One movie is usually 20+GB. My friends can also add things. Only thing is example someone put grays anatomy on. It will then download ALL episodes. Something I need to look into. Lol.
If just for example shows you follow just create a RSS feed. Insert the feed in torrent software and it will download when available. Just Google RSS feed in torrent. I just like this way to get what I want on PLEX.
Nice, yeah I think after these arrive I'm going to move my Plex installation to Docker and explore Sonarr/Radarr setups. Watchlistarr sounds good if I can use it to limit to specific things I want it to download!
@Madrical: Yeah works great. Haven't looked much into just new seasons and so on instead of ALL. In sonarr radar you can change it. Probably able in watchlistarr too. It works so ain't touching it. Lots of space and fast Internet so doesn't worry me much. Can just delete it from plex. In Plex and it delete from drive.
Haven't even googled the solution.
Has anyone received their order yet? or even shipping confirmation?
My order is still sitting at confirmed. I have tried contacting East Digital three times. They haven't even bothered to reply to any of the emails.
I'm in a similar boat. Have contacted them twice with some questions and have not received a single reply.
I made one order the 28th and that shipped. Arriving here tomorrow. 18tb. The other 2 orders that I ordered after, not same day haven't been shipped.
18tb was already in stock on website. They seemed to have a slightly higher hour count and hadn't sold as well.
I'm wondering if they sold the 16tb drives before they had them.
@buffalo bill: I'll say something like that happened.
Got my 18Tb today. Currently running full read write test 180-190MB/s SMART says fine health 100%. Booted 10 times. power on time 1114 days. Cannot see the written/read data in HDD sentinel 52Hours left on test. upgrading my UNRAID.
Just received an email back from them. all i got. At least something.
""we need to prepare the goods, it may be delayed for shipment
![[Used] WD Ultrastar HC550 16TB 3.5″ Enterprise SATA HDD $269 Delivered @ East Digital](https://files.ozbargain.com.au/n/04/903204.jpg?h=85f9db81)
Chkami58 on 25/04/2025 - 15:15 Comment score below threshold.
Yankee
Sales Manager""
Next email few minutes later
Sorry, we need to prepare the goods, it may be delayed for shipment， About a week
They had a public holidays aswell 1st to 5th may. Just got reply on teams. They are probably glad to be back and going through our emails lol.