On Thu, 12 Jan 2017 14:31:06 -0600, VanguardLH wrote:

Lynn McGuire wrote:

Why is the cheapest WD 8 TB bare drive on Big River $303 ?
https://www.amazon.com/Red-8TB-Hard-...dp/B01BYLY4DM/

Do I need to buy an WD 8 TB external drive for $225 and remove the bare drive from it ?
https://www.amazon.com/Book-Desktop-...dp/B01LQQHLGC/

Please note that I am not interested in Seagate or any other manufacturer. I am going with WD for the moment.

Because of the slashed $299 price (marked down to $225) for the USB
cased unit, looks like that is a sale price. So the non-sale price of
the USB case drive is about the same as the non-sale price for the
single drive to which you linked.

https://www.wdc.com/products/external-storage.html
Click on the "My Book (New)" image.

No matter on what size you select, all prices are listed as "promo".
WDC is doing a promotional sale on that product family. Now you'll have
to find or wait for a sale on red WDC HDDs, or wait until the 8TB My
Book is no longer on sale to see what is its actual non-sale price, so
you are not comparing apples to oranges regarding pricing.

And since both of the links above are Amazon links, we can get some
additional information by plugging them into the Amazon price tracker
website, www.camelcamelcamel.com.

http://camelcamelcamel.com/Red-8TB-H...uct/B01BYLY4DM

http://camelcamelcamel.com/Book-Desk...uct/B01LQQHLGC

Not all secrets are revealed, but we get to see 3 months to nearly a
year of price history to help with the analysis and decision making.
I'm referring, of course, to the Price History charts on those two
respective pages.