Today’s B&H DealZone (one-day deal) is the WD 8TB My Book USB 3.0 External Hard Drive for $189.95.
This is a great price point for an 8TB USB 3.0 external hard drive. It’s compatible with both Windows and Mac (Time Machine), and also features a nifty hardware encryption feature as well as 2-year warranty. This deal is today only (or until sold out.)
Stas Furman
Damn I just bought the new MacBook pro yesterday.
Andrew Scott Wolfe
That’s a hell of a deal. O.o go for it
Sam Clausen
As always, thank you CPW for bringing us the best deals! I just ordered one…
I don’t recommend this type of hard drive, since it has bad habit of suddenly stop working and taking your files along with to the grave.
A single hard drive should never be the only copy of your files. We recommend using drives like this to backup your files, or transport your files.
Every hard drive will eventually stop working. Do you have any data indicating that this unit has a higher failure rate? Or is it just speculation based off a random user review? My understanding from someone that dissected the drive is it has a HGST drive inside that runs exceptionally cool, both of which are indicators of solid reliability.
Nearly all hard drives have high enough failure rates that you should never rely on one. At minimum you should have a two-drive raid-1 setup, and also another place to back that up to (even something like Amazon Cloud Drive – if you have Amazon Prime, you can upload unlimited photos including raws).
Thank you fir the solid advice. However i was just noting the tendancy of the particular line of products to suddenly die. Even before 3 years warrenty time had passed.
I store my pics on a sd card.
One issue with the architecture of this product is a side effect of one of its features. Drive encryption is done using a key presented by circuitry in the drive enclosure, not on the drive. If the enclosure fails, whether the drive is good is pointless – the drive is unreadable in another enclosure, or directly connected to a system unless you crack the encryption first.
All of my critical data sits on WD black drives, and they’re backed up to systems using only WD black drives. (A lot of those drives came from B&H.) I’m not recommending against this drive, or saying it’s better or worse than its competitors. I own and use several WD external drives but I don’t own this particular product. It is a great price, though.