My over active imagination strikes again... I won't even mention what I was thinking



Why would you risk an early drive failure (without warranty), would not a couple of
those quickly negate the savings of buying the externals?
Well, see, the math's pretty straightforward.
8TB SMR drives are about $200. But SMR is unsuitable for rewrite applications because "slow".
8TB Red drives are about $350 and are probably suitable for the application. Normally I might be looking there. Four of them runs me $1400.
Shucked drives are a losing game if RMA turns into a problem. Since (if you follow that link) it's pretty clear that HGST will not appreciate shuckers. Take a look at the labels in one of those linked articles. The bare drives are OEM locked and won't be accepted by HGST for RMA (try it in their warranty tool).
But the HGST drives have really been on the "very good" side of reliability in recent years, which is one big reason it was so disappointing to see WD buy them.
http://arstechnica.com/information-...uper-reliable-seagates-have-greatly-improved/
The Backblaze guys apparently got a bunch of the 8TB He8's for one of their pods and they show a "5%" failure rate over 10 months, but that seems really like two of 45 disks or something like that. Plus there's a reasonable chance that those were infant mortality.
So given that the acquisition price was ~$265 each for the WD My Books, that's $1325, which gives me one spare drive, at a cost less than four 8TB Reds with warranty.
Further, the He8 disks are 7200RPM enterprise class drives, with better performance characteristics for a backup server.
So if I can get past the infant mortality phase with my warranty intact, I've probably got a good chance of having a usable set of spinners with a spare, from a manufacturer whose failure rates have been very low in recent times, and since it is very likely they're still coming off the same HGST production line, and not some WD production line and being relabeled, well, ... I'm likely to come out in a good position here.
Then you go and look at the price of the He8 8TB drive. At almost $500 each. I could have bought two or three spares and still come out ahead!