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saw this at SlickDeals, some say it's a good price since hard drives prices will go up with upcoming shortages.
May be a price mistake since it's higher in the weekly ads. as always YMMV
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Western+Digi...8320893530&skuId=2266052&st=2266052,%201261281_&cp=1&lp=1
SD thread
http://m.slickdeals.net/forums/showthread.php?t=3545928
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That is the price in the online ad (and it is store pick up only) There is a 3TB for $139 that has free shipping listed on the front page here, as well as a couple other BestBuy hard drive deals. LaCie 1TB portable for $99 and a Seagate 1TB internal for $55.
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Shipping: Not available
Store Pickup: Not Available
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I got a MyBook 2TB drive at BestBuy a week or so ago for $90 (in-store), to replace my Seagate Time Machine drive that had problems. I would have preferred to buy a drive from our sponsor, but their 2TB Elite Pro drive was a lot more money (c. $150 I think, before the current price spike), albeit with more interfaces; the MyBook is USB-only (3.0 and 2.0). And I needed to move quickly; the store is 10 minutes away.
I assume that HD prices will come back down once the floods in Thailand have subsided. I'm a little surprised OWC doesn't have a notice about the surge in prices on their External Storage page; not everyone reads forums like this one.
/Mr Lynn
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See below. This post hung up & I had to restart.
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Costco had the 3 TB version for $110 after instant rebate a couple of days ago:
http://forums.macresource.com/read.php?1,1260514
Limit two per customer, and sales tax on the pre-rebate price of $129.99.
Good luck.
- Winston
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The 1.5TB for $60 isn't bad at all-- I paid $60 for the same item at Best Buy just about 6 weeks ago, for a Mac edition MyBook of 2TB capacity. But that was for USB 2
Note, however, that the drives used in a USB 3 drive are going to be MUCH MORE CAPABLE than any drives in a USB case, and may even state what drive is in the box.
WD states on their site (as I noted in a post last week about drive performance (via USB across drives from 6 years old to brand new, via USB 2) - that they guaranty NOTHING except the capacity of the drive in their USB 2 and FW400 cases. Not even the brand of drive inside the case!!
They don't even guaranty that it will be a SATA drive -- it could have Native USB as the controller card on the drive itself.
That's what you get for your 90 Day Warranty -- such a bargain!
With USB 3, however, there is a much better chance that they will state "Caviar XX" on the drive box.
Still - there is no guarantee that you'll get a drive with a SATA connector on it - because a native USB 3 connector on the drive would meet or exceed all three SATA bus saturation points (5Gbit/sec vs the ELECTRONICS value of SATA 1 thru 3 - going as high as 6GBit/sec) - even though the drive itself isn't going to get past the 120MB/sec that is simply the FACTS OF LIFE & Physics of trying to slam a mechanical device around and achieve rates of transfer that a CHIP supports, but real life cannot.
In every case out there right now that isn't a RAID box, there isn't a single standard drive that has exceeded the SATA 1 spec as of yet. Even the 15000 rpm SCSI devices out there top out at 89MB/sec. The best I've seen so far has been 118MB/sec from a stand alone 3.5" drive. Still well within the SATA 1 spec.
So be careful if you think you're going to crack open a box and get a drive that's ready to use in your tower or RAID box. You might be disappointed - and if you rush, you'll have an external that you can't use beyond 30MB/sec in USB 2 mode (the Mac's curse), or worse yet, a case you broke and can't even return it.
Until SSDs start going in those boxes, which will surely be soon, as USB 3 propagates, and mechanicals are left only for mass storage and little else, what's in those boxes doesn't mean much. And it means even less to "US" because we still don't sport USB 3 or eSATA ports on the portables.
-edit
a few typos
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Jimmypoo wrote:
That's what you get for your 90 Day Warranty -- such a bargain!
The WD drive I got (from Office Depot, but Costco had the same thing) has a 2 year warranty. Box does not say anything about what kind of drive is inside. What I found online did say that these are "sub 6000 RPM" "green" drive mechanisms.
Review here says it has a USB 3 to SATA bridge inside. But as Jimmypoo points out, manufacturers sometimes change specs without warning.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3981/weste...reviewed/3
The review also has a detailed discussion of the issues around using a 3 TB drive mechanism, and pointed out that these "green" drives are relatively slow. OK for archiving, but probably not what you want as a boot drive containing applications.
Good luck.
- Winston
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On the above point -- I find that booting 10.6.8 or even Lion, is not HORRIBLE, though it does take about 1 minute longer than the internal drive.
That's via USB 2, so whether the drive is a 5400 or the strange 5900RPM drives I've seen, it's still faster than the USB 2 bus - so if you buy it because it's USB 3 -- just note that the best you'll ever get is the best the drive can do -- and since these aren't top end drives, don't expect it to show more than, say, 70-80MB/sec, via USB 3, IF WE EVER GET a machine with USB 3, of course.
But as noted - if those cases do contain the SATA/USB 3 converter - then you'll get a SATA drive, but it will just be a decent price on a raw drive that comes to about 4 cents a GB. The previous deal that someone posted and I grabbed two of (USB 2 Mac edition of MyBook) was $60 for 2TB, (3cents/GB) but I don't yet know what is in the case. I've read some have Hitachi branded "Raptor" drives (a 5900rpm green thing) that has nothing to do with the Velociraptor by WD, and others have the native USB drive board attached to the drive, so it just direct connects to the plug on back.
I will probably open one of mine (the unused one most likely) since I can't get confirmation on what I have, and I am bored, and MUST KNOW!!!!
My loss (God rest it's parts if I bust it) will be your gain.
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