NAS storage isn't cheap with drives costing considerably more than desktop PC counterparts. Cyber Monday helps with some notable discounts, but even the best NAS hard drive deal cannot beat this Western Digital 18TB Elements external storage offer. It's currently on sale with $90 discounted from the MSRP.
Instead of buying a NAS HDD, you can simply extract a drive from these devices. It voids the warranty, but if you already own a NAS, you can sell the empty shell to someone else or recycle it. If you want to use four drives, you could save upwards of $400 in total.
Inside this enclosure, you'll find a white label 18TB Western Digital HDD. These devices are designed to run for prolonged periods of time, just like a NAS enclosure.
So, just how good are these deals? If we look at the price of a new Western Digital Red series HDD, especially the 18TB model, the price difference is huge. There's an 18TB drive inside the Elements enclosure, which costs $340 ($0.02 per GB, $19 per TB) with Cyber Monday. Since it's an 18TB drive, we need to move up to the more expensive Western Digital Red Pro series for a comparable 18TB drive and that retails for $430 ($0.02 /GB, $17 /TB). Buying the enclosure would save you $90 per drive.
For the 12TB enclosure, you're looking at a price of $200 ($0.02 /GB, $ /TB), which is considerably more affordable than the $260 or so you can pay for a 12TB NAS drive.
Of course, we don't recommend you actually carry out the process of voiding your warranty with Western Digital by taking apart the enclosures and extracting the drives, but the entire process doesn't require anything other than a screwdriver. These drives are just as good as the NAS drives you can buy from WD or Seagate, so this is a great offer.
If you're looking for an enclosure to use these larger drives with, we're constantly adding more best Cyber Monday NAS deals, so be on the lookout.
