• expired

4TB WD My Passport External HDD $169 + Shipping @ MightyApe

40

Not the cheapest ever, but a good price for local stock.

Mighty Ape = $169 +freeshipping with code SHIPITFREE (if it works)

JB Hifi also have the same for $169
https://www.jbhifi.co.nz/wd/wd-my-passport-4tb-portable-hard…

Related Stores

Mighty Ape
Mighty Ape

closed Comments

  • Hi,

    I am about to purchase a new drive, and this post nudged me to actually look around.

    I figured I'd start with PriceMe, so I went to this page for all external hard drives:

    https://www.priceme.co.nz/External-Hard-Drives/c-489.aspx

    I then wanted to filter for 4TB up to 8TB, but I cannot figure out how to do that. I can drop the top end down, but how do I filter out all the smaller drives? I can't seem to get it to budge from 5GB (GB, not TB!)

    Am I missing something obvious?

    Thanks,

    Alan.

    • The slider on priceme isnt so user friendly. There should be two sliders (lower and upper limits) but there is only one. Youre probably better off using pricespy to filter suppliers/drives (which has two sliders), but its equally as fiddly (you can type the values in if needed)

      • Okay - thanks.

        I thought I was just being dim!

        Alan.

    • +1

      Also on themarket as well, but currently no discount coupons (just wait a few days lol). You can always use your referral bonus to knock down the price abit more.

  • What are your thoughts on the best buys right now?

    4TB drives have lower $ / TB than 5, 6, 8, or 10TB drives by the looks of it.

    However, a 10TB drive will (potentially) have a longer life in terms of being useful for longer (I have 250GB drives around here somewhere that work fine, but are much less useful in a practical sense now). I should try to sell them on TradeMe I guess!

    I am not sure if larger capacity drives are more likely to fail (either in absolute terms of relative to their capacity)? Bad sectors must be somewhat proportional to capacity, but bad sectors in and of themselves aren't necessarily an issue, just that they might be indicative of other issues with the drive that are manifesting as such.

    What are your thoughts on the actual 'sweet spot' considering useful life, rather than just the raw $ / TB?

    Thanks,

    Alan.

    • I bought 4x 10tbs from amazon for around 350nzd each which are great.
      Your 250gb will have no value, best to keep it.

      Failure is impossible to figure out but one theory by hoarders powering on/off (mechanical wear) as opposed to leaving it spin 24/7 and keeping it at it's ideal temperature.
      Backups is the only solution since all drives are subject to fail and your sweet spot is determined by how much space you need and will need in the future.

      My sweetspot is when i can afford 2 or more drives of the same size but those 8tb on pricespy look nice

      backblaze releases info on their failures.
      https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html

    • This is a portable i.e. 2.5" with no external power supply required for USB, not a 3.5" drive. You can't get 10TB 2.5" hard drives. (It's possible some portables exist with 2 drives, not sure.) The current limit is I think 6TB although that would likely be SMR. Actually I think this may be SMR as well, not sure.

      Also the lowest $/TB for external drives from Amazon is currently generally in the 12TB range, at least if you wait for them to go on sale. Possibly 14TB being best may be coming soon, since the Best Buy version has happened a few times (US$200) and Amazon normally follows within a year.

      • Should clarify I don't pay that much attention to the market and barely looked into it since December last year or so. I'm not sure if component shortages or high demand are starting to affect HDs too. I did read just now concerns Chia may affect the market although I would have thought HDs are fairly useless for that.

        • Seems Chia is more concerning for HD prices than I thought. I barely knew how it works when I wrote the above. Now I understand how it works, I realise that although you probably don't want to use a HD for plotting, you may want to use it for farming/storing your plots. So if the Chia craze continues, it may mean sustained higher prices for the next few months, as well as SSDs :-( I was right it's already starting to affect HD prices (as well as SSDs) at least outside NZ.

          Hey at least maybe the Chinese government is helping us out with GPU prices.

          • @Nil Einne: Noticed a few NZ companies advertising Chia gear over the last month or so too. Extreme PC and PC Force.

          • @Nil Einne: Hi Nil,

            None of the above - I would be storing photos, videos, a few documents, and backups from family machines which are then collated and backed up to a cloud storage provider.

            No plotting, farming, or anything Chia related :-)

            Alan.

      • "This is a portable i.e. 2.5""
        Also wd has been putting the usb interface directly to the hdd now instead of sata, which is undesirable.
        I dont know if seagate does it now (havent paid attention)

        • Yes - my question was more general, but you are right that the specific model above is a 2.5" drive.

          I don't normally buy 2.5" for external storage - only for newer servers that only take those (and they would be enterprise grade drives anyway).

          When you say that the lowest $ /TB is for 12TB drives, do you have an example you could link to?

          The 12TB SeaGate I found:

          https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Expansion-12TB-External-Drive…

          works out at US$27.60 per TB, which is around NZ$38 / TB, (shipping is not available to NZ on that one, but I'm not sure what shipping would usually bring that up to anyway), compared to, say, NZ$42.50 / TB locally (which I can collect when passing so no freight cost). If shipping from USA was less than $54 (assuming you could find someone willing to) then the $ / TB is favourable, and for a larger drive, so a longer (potential) life / usefulness.

          Alan.

Login or Join to leave a comment