Best Place to Buy Hard Drives?

FURRYe38 wrote:

Places like newegg, amazon, I've got good drives from for NAS. I prefer the Western Digital RED drives for my NAS. 

Be a little careful here.  WD started shipping SMR drives for some of the WD Reds, and those particular drives aren't good options for ReadyNAS.  There was a lot of pushback, and WD ended up re-branding their CMR Red drives as WD Red Plus.  More recently they stopped selling WD Reds.  However, there might be old inventory still, and you don't want to purchase one of these older SMR models. 

 

The saga there is still on-going, a recent article is here:

• https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/wd-launches-investigation-into-problems-with-its-smr-hard-drives-the-same-drives-that-got-wd-sued-in-2021-now-reporting-failure-rates-due-to-fundamental-flaws

Today the SMR/CMR technology info is included on WD and Seagate datasheets (and Toshiba also), so you can double-check the technology prior to purchase if you are worried you might get one of these older drives.

 

 

For a long time I used WD Reds exclusively, but more recently have begun mixing in some Ironwolf.  I've had no problems with either (or with mixing them).  So now I look at both, and purchase whatever is less expensive at the time.