Not as good as the previous MyBook deal but still not a bad deal.
Have shucked a few 8TB Elements previously and they are still ticking fine in my Home NAS.
CamelCamelCamel.
Maybe a bit late but a quick word of warning, I've been looking around the Datahoarder Reddit a bit more and followed up with more technical reading elsewhere and I don't think there's any guarantee you'll get a helium drive with these. It seems air filled 10TBs are starting to show up in them e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ava6wp/bh_has_… . I suspect if not already also the other WD externals (MyBook and the BestBuy exclusive? EasyStore which is often at this price). I think at the moment heliums are still more common than air filled but if it matters to you, caveat emptor I guess.
While I'm always cautious about such claims since I've found a lot of misinfo, especially if it's someone reporting something they think they read/heard some of the reports seem to be direct reports. And there are several signs especially SMART value 22, and bare drive design especially an air hole, and also power consumption and heat which would be strong indicators. Probably transfer speeds too since air filled likely means denser platters so higher sustained read/write speeds.
(The perils of SMR seem to be one thing with a lot of misinfo. While you probably don't want it a classic RAID, database or boot drive or a number of other extremely frequently rewrite use cases; from my experience with modern Seagate SMR drives things aren't as bad as a lot of people seem to think. Simply use it like a normal drive and with moving stuff around and deleting etc when needed and you often won't even notice the difference. I think sufficient caching combined with sufficient PMR regions and smart firmware means it can be quite difficult to trigger an extreme SMR slow down. And I've seen reports of people using them in fancier setups e.g. UnRAID without issue not that I'm recommending that. A lot of the reports of the perils are third party or worse or theoretical i.e. someone saying what they think based on something they read or heard somewhere. Or what they think they know about how SMR works. And a lot of the major problems from actual experiences seem to have come from the early days when Seagate hadn't worked out the kinks.)
I admit until the past 2 months I was myself confused and thought non-SMR PMR platters (i.e. CMR) hadn't advanced in density much in the past few years but actually WD are up to 1.75TB and Showa Denko (so Toshiba and Seagate) about the same hence we have 14-16TB PMR Helium filled even though Helium platter limit is currently about 9 I believe. Meanwhile Toshiba managed to cram 7 platters into an air filled drive. And I think Toshiba were the first to make an air filled non-SMR PMR 10TB drive as a result. Seagate also managed 6 a while back.
I couldn't actually find reports of WD doing the same but I think if they had managed 2TB platters in a production drive it's more likely I have found it. So I suspect the airfilled are 6 platter or maybe 7 platter. (Of course these searches are made difficult by lots of false positives like e.g. people talking about 2TB drives. And most talk of helium also mentions air filled and nowadays a lot of talk of air is likely to mentioned helium. Along with marketing hype or sometimes the lack of it. Etc etc.)
This probably in part explains why the 10TB drive prices are showing up at low prices now. Also the fact that the larger ones are getting enough production that they're starting to show up in external casing so 10TB is no longer the largest single drive regular retail external.
OTOH I suspect this also means WD helium 10TBs are going to get rarer and more expensive if you want guaranteed helium if that's even possible for a lowly consumer, so you probably don't want to wait. (I suspect some will shows up in external casings for a while both because of the general long tail and also that there are likely some enterprise customers who do want low end helium drives. And I've long believed that at least some percent of the drives in externals are such drives which didn't make the grade for whatever reason.)
If anyone wants to roll the dice on the WD Red 10TB which is down to US$215 but “Out of Stock”.
https://www.amazon.com/Red-10TB-NAS-Hard-Drive/dp/B0719498XY
We need a few more 8-10TB+ HDD in the near future for a non commercial 100% Home Based Private Media Server + Complete Backup of Entire Media Collection..
Whats the best way of being notified / not missing out on future increasingly & more 4 solid deals?
We should see some 8TB~US200 + 10TB~US230 soon hopefully.
Add the product to CamelCamel and set email triggers.Another way is to sign up for Slickdeals email notifications (I think you can set category based alerts).
The 6TB is a Prime deal limit 2 and cheaper per TB when you don't consider shipping, becomes similar when you do (bearing in mind buying 2 reduces shipping per unit).
The Seagate 8TB is US$118.99 + shipping another Prime deal and probably slightly cheaper than this even considering shipping if you don't mind Seagate SMR and also only 1 year warranty compared to 2. https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Desktop-External-Drive-STGY80…
From what I can tell, these 10TB drives seem to regularly sell at this price (well maybe US$159.99 instead of $159.49) with various retailers in the US so it's not a rare deal. Pity they didn't match the US$145.99 :-( Still with the US$5 coupon it may be worth it if you're in the market for a new drive especially given you'll probably want to buy it before December and if you're already buying other stuff.