There are plenty of great options if you’re looking to buy a NAS enclosure right now. But most NAS enclosures are diskless, which means you will have to pick up a hard drive separately. There are hard drives designed for use in a NAS like Seagate’s IronWolf and the WD Red series, but I’m going to highlight my favorite 14TB drive: the WD Easystore.
The 14TB WD Easystore isn’t a standalone drive but a storage enclosure in its own right, but it contains a 14TB WD140EDFZ hard drive, a white-label HDD built by WD that delivers the same level of performance as the IronWolf or WD Red drives. What that means is that with the 14TB Easystore now available for just $190, you can get your hands on a 14TB NAS-ready hard drive for under $200, making it one of the best Black Friday storage deals around.
A hidden gem
WD Easystore 14TB | $120 off
$190 at Best Buy
The Easystore 14TB contains a white-label WD hard drive that’s ideal for use in a NAS enclosure. I’ve been using two of these drives in my NAS for the last year, and they’re just as fast and reliable as the IronWolf Pro. The included hard drive spins at 7200rpm, is filled with helium, and is the best value you’ll find today.
It’s relatively easy to shuck the Easystore — wherein you extract the hard drive from its housing — and it doesn’t take more than ten minutes to do so. Once you extract the drive, all you then need to do is slot it into your NAS enclosure, and you have a 14TB NAS-ready hard drive that costs several hundred dollars less than its rivals. For context, Seagate’s 14TB IronWolf costs $476, and you can get two 14TB Easystores for less than that price.
The hard drive that’s housed within the Easystore is the WD140EDFZ, and it is a 7200rpm CMR drive that’s filled with helium. In day-to-day use, it delivers the same level of performance as the IronWolf Pro drive while being quieter. I’ve used two of these WD140EDFZ drives in my NAS for more than a year now, and I haven’t had any issues with them whatsoever. So if you are looking for a hard drive for your NAS, the 14TB WD Easystore is an excellent choice at just $190.
