Good Deal on WD RED/White at BB right now.

[Jmanb13]

I've been lurking here for a little bit reading/learning as much as I can and buying hardware as I can afford/find it. I wanted to share with everyone that BestBuy is having a crazy deal on holiday stock of WD Easystore 8TB drives (WDBCKA0080HBK-NESN ). From information I've seen these are WD Red drives inside, sometimes white label but still Red hardware/firmware. I picked up 6 of them today (they had well over 30 on the shelves)

Anyway, enjoy.

8TB - $129.99 each $16.25/TB
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-eas...sb-3-0-hard-drive-black/5792401.p?ref=8575135

 

[Jmanb13]

Confirmed.

 

[rmccullough]

This seems like a great deal? Am I crazy?

 

[Jmanb13]

I've been looking at drives for a bit and the going rate right now is between $28 and $45 per terabyte depending on drive size. So at $16 it's a stellar deal. Especially for a WD red.

The normal price for a bare drive 8TB WD Red is ~$250

 

[Jailer]

I picked up 6 of these on black friday. Ended up with 1 red and 5 white labels. They are all working great.

 

[Jmanb13]

I ended up with 2x Red and 4x White.

The date on the 2 REDS are from January 2018. Everything else is Apr to Sep 2018. Seems they might have switched all the newer ones to white.

 

[rmccullough]

The timing was terrible for me (have some other expenses), otherwise I would have picked up several. Thanks for the notice though.

 

[sremick]

Unfortunately the white labels have TLER disabled and have a wonky power-up issue you need to hack around. What you get on the inside is a crapshoot, seems to lean more white though.

 

[Jailer]

Unfortunately the white labels have TLER disabled

Not the ones I got.

a wonky power-up issue you need to hack around.

A molex to SATA adapter fixes this.

 

[Constantin]

The 3.3V SATA power issue didn't affect the drives inside a Mobius 5 enclosure. I also didn't experience any issues with my Lian Li backplane. The latter, presumably because there is no 3.3V power going to the backplanes from the power supply - only 12V, 5V, and 2x GND. Masking the copper header pins in question with some tape is certainly possible if you're hands are steady, you have an Xacto knife, and potentially a set of magnifiers if you're my age.

 

[Jmanb13]

Everything was identical between my RED and WHITE drives (firmware, smart features etc). The white ones did have 2 extra physical jumper pins on the back. No idea what they are for. Any 3.3v issues don't affect my MD1200, so no idea on that front. I checked if TLER was enabled on 2 of my white drives and it was on both.

 

[danb35]

Got two of these, one red, one white. When Best Buy doesn't have them on sale, Amazon has the "WD Elements" model for a regular price of $149. They aren't identical to the Easystor models, but the shucking procedure is the same.