I haven't seen any 4TB portable hard drives cheap recently. This one is $153.99 after clicking to claim the $5.01 coupon from Amazon.
CamelCamelCamel.
$39.75 / tb. Granted it's a portable drive form factor but yeah…
Personally i would stay away from WD portables. The USB port is integrated onto the HD's mainboard, so you unable to "shuck" it in the case of failure or want/need to turn it into an internal drive.
USB 3.0 Type B in my experience with these drives is quite fragile, 100% agree to avoid.
Fun fact, same connector was used for one generation of Samsung phones: Galaxy S5 and Note 3.
This any good just for server storage?
You can't shuck it if you want the drive inside of your server. Also if it's already a server, you must have a power outlet nearby. Use a desktop external drive instead.
2.5" drives, especially large format ones, are guaranteed to be SMR. They suck for anything more than occasional backup or casual use.
No worries, thanks for the answer
I'm sure they're talking about enterprise SMR drives (like HC600 series from WD) + likely Host-managed SMR mode specifically optimised for these drives and workload.
I had a Seagate 5TB 2.5" SMR inside CloudKey Gen2 Plus, failed in less than 3 months, then RMA, and the RMAed drives didn't live over half a year. Also Seagate 8x8TB SMR that went through RAID6 rebuild at the speed of <20MB/s averaged (single digit at lowest point - in comparison WD CMR can rebuild at speed of 150-200MB/s), which took almost half a month to complete the rebuild. Thank goodness with write cache it worked fine on normal load.
2.5" drives you can easily buy on the market are probably all SMR: https://www.seagate.com/au/en/products/cmr-smr-list/
already out of stock on the site.
Available locally at Officeworks, which if you have OnePass membership makes it even cheaper at ~$151 (1590 points with OnePass make it worth about $8. There is 10x points promo till 21 May if I’m not wrong)
According to camels, the last time it was this price was around july last year