YMMV: WD Elements 12TB $186 - Plex Pass Users

ClockerXP

Gawd
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Jan 6, 2005
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I bought a couple 12TB WD Elements drives to replace the 8TB drives in my Plex server last week.

If you have a PlexPass, there's a Perks link at the bottom of the Plex page that will give you a 20% off coupon for the WD store + WD gives you 10% off your first purchase at their store. Some people on Reddit have claimed the coupon stacking didn't work for them - but it did for me.

I have not shucked the drives to investigate yet - I'll be picking them up later today.
 

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No code is needed for the 10% from WD. It is automatically applied to your first purchase from their store, you then apply the 20% code from Plex.
 
I did CrystalDisk Info and the 12TB Elements I got appear to contain the same drive referenced here:
 
Do you know what the limit is? I need drives for a new server I plan on building.
 
There doesn't appear to be a limit for ordering drives, it let me add 12 without any issues. But the Plex coupon code would only work on up to 8 drives, any number after that it still kept the code in there but showed a discount of $0.00. Too bad they don't have the 14TB in stock, they're not a bad starting price of 279.99 once you start using the coupons. I'd bite but I already filled most of TS-1677X with the cheap 10TB elements and it's not worth it to upgrade just for 2TB a drive. But great price on them.
 
So the Plex Pass 20% off is good until the end of the year. Is the WD 10% off a long-running promo, for first time orders? If so, I'd rather wait until the 14TB come back in stock. They're only $21 more than the 12TB drives after the discounts.

My current NAS is in RAID-5 with 4, 4TB HGST Reds from about 4 years ago. Roughly 10.8TB usable and I still have 2TB left. I really, really don't need new drives yet...but this is tempting!
 
There doesn't appear to be a limit for ordering drives, it let me add 12 without any issues. But the Plex coupon code would only work on up to 8 drives, any number after that it still kept the code in there but showed a discount of $0.00. Too bad they don't have the 14TB in stock, they're not a bad starting price of 279.99 once you start using the coupons. I'd bite but I already filled most of TS-1677X with the cheap 10TB elements and it's not worth it to upgrade just for 2TB a drive. But great price on them.

I just bought the TS-1677X as well. It has no drives in it so I am looking for the largest cheapest drives I can get right now. I have 10TB drives in my TS-1282 and my TS-453mini, I wouldn't buy the 12tb for those either, a 2tb per drive upgrade wouldn't be worth the time.
 
I have to ask...what type of application are you guys using your TS-1677X's in? I can't imagine that amount of storage! Also, are you doing off-site backups? If so, how are you achieving this? That's one of my biggest hang-ups going with larger drives in my 4-bay NAS.

Thanks.
 
I currently backup my Plex server to it, but the plan is to switch over to using it for storage for Plex and then back it up to a Server 2019 box running storage spaces.
 
It is interesting to see how fast drive prices are falling. But I guess they need to in order to keep up with the value the larger ssds provide. I think 1-4tb hard drives may go extinct in a year or so. :eek:
 
I have to ask...what type of application are you guys using your TS-1677X's in? I can't imagine that amount of storage! Also, are you doing off-site backups? If so, how are you achieving this? That's one of my biggest hang-ups going with larger drives in my 4-bay NAS.

Thanks.

My Plan for the TVs-1677x is to replace my TS-1282 and the 1282 to be onsite back for that. I do simulation with big data sets that often generate GBs of data each time. A single project might take a few tbs. TS-453mini is for Plex, family photos and security camera system backups.

So I used to only have Comcast and they have a data cap here in Houston so I made sure when I moved, where I moved had fiber available without data caps. So I have both, fiber to upload backups to black blaze (it’s going to take a few weeks the upload goes about 50mbps) and comcast for regular usage. I also plan on doing tape storage for local archival needs.
 
So the Plex Pass 20% off is good until the end of the year. Is the WD 10% off a long-running promo, for first time orders? If so, I'd rather wait until the 14TB come back in stock. They're only $21 more than the 12TB drives after the discounts.

My current NAS is in RAID-5 with 4, 4TB HGST Reds from about 4 years ago. Roughly 10.8TB usable and I still have 2TB left. I really, really don't need new drives yet...but this is tempting!

Maybe I'm old and dumb, and been in apps to long, but isn't large >1tb drives risky for raid5? Or have the controllers just gotten a lot better in the last 10 years.
 
Maybe I'm old and dumb, and been in apps to long, but isn't large >1tb drives risky for raid5? Or have the controllers just gotten a lot better in the last 10 years.
It still is very risky without other redundancy like mirroring so raid5+1, etc. Rebuilding stresses the drives and at the larger sizes takes long enough to rebuild that the chance of another drive failure is high.

That being said, anyone using raid5/6/etc typically knows this and has another form of backup. (y)
 
My tiny little Drivepool 2 drive setup seems to like these 12TB drives, replacing the two 8TB drives I had before. Swapping out drives and data duplication was was easy & fast. Love Stablebit Drivepool & Scanner.
 
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Maybe I'm old and dumb, and been in apps to long, but isn't large >1tb drives risky for raid5? Or have the controllers just gotten a lot better in the last 10 years.
When I moved from 5x 1tb to 5x 4tb, I moved to Raid 6. The failure rate hasn't gotten any better as drive sizes have increased, so the odds of getting another URE during a rebuild have only climbed. Now I'm at 8x 4tb and 8x 8tb for two raid 6 arrays, knowing full well there's a pretty high chance rebuilding either of these will likely have an URE during it, and possible a second (negating the benefits of 6.) Gotta have a full backup in play, the raid is just for increased uptime.
 
Gotta have a full backup in play, the raid is just for increased uptime.
Exactly. RAID is only a performance and uptime multiplier, not a reliability or backup multiplier or substitute. This is why I switched to JBOD + snapshot based parity eons ago, and sold all my hardware raid controllers - there's no need to stripe huge libraries of bluray rips or media files unless you're running a streaming video business or something that otherwise generates revenue.
 
Which snapshot program would you recommend?
Parity: https://www.snapraid.it/
Pooling: https://stablebit.com/

This combo of Drivepool + SnapRAID has been stable for years for me. No more rebuilding the entire array just to add a drive for more space; no more entire array spinning up just to read one file. Downside is that SnapRAID is command line based, and so you have to automate the snapshots and scrubs yourself with a script or batch file. But running manually is easy enough.
 
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