Go to Buy.com, search for "Cavalry 2TB".  You'll see one listed as 409.99, that's the after rebate price.  Do check out the other Cavalry options as well, there's one for just under $500 that has the same two WD 1TB drives, but also has an eSATA port (so you could possibly use this as an external enclosure instead of ripping the drives out).  It's a great price for just the drives, with the bonus of a usb enclosure for two sata drives (too slow for regular use, but it wouldn't be bad for occasional use).

 

Ok, so the price is $443.99.  Use a 5% off coupon to take off $15 (the coupon is really a 5% or $15 off, whichever is less), that's $428.99 shipped.  A pretty good deal even if you are bad about not sending in rebates.  Send in the $34 rebate, and now you just paid less than $200 per drive.

 

Direct link to the drive:  http://www.buy.com/prod/cavalry-2tb-2-x-1tb-sata-drives-usb-2-0-external-hard-drive/q/loc/101/205714248.html

 

Link to the 5% coupon:  http://www.buy.com/retail/coupon.asp?prid=84773074

 

Rebate ends today.

 

Edit:  The description does not state that it comes with WD drives, but do a search and everyone says theirs came with the WD 1TB drives.  While I haven't received this exact model yet (due to be delivered Friday), I did order the similar model with eSATA (for my DirecTV HR20) and it came with the WD 1TB drives.  Warranty showed as valid on both drives.

What is inside?

Are these the 5400 RPM drives?

 

I was planning to purchase a pair in the near future.

Speed isn't listed, I believe they're just the normal 5400-7200rpm drives.  If memory serves right they're the regular ones, not the RAID ones.  There is a difference, but for our purposes the regular are just fine, and do in fact work just fine with RAID.  It should only affect users with regular RAID, where you need to read from multiple drives at once to get a file (if one drive took too long, i.e. powered down or what-not, it could be perceived as an error; this doesn't affect unRAID to my knowledge).  Regardless, if you DID want the RAID version, just get the whatever's cheaper.  There's an official WD tool floating around that can disable or enable TLER, so you can make a non-RE version drive into the RE version, or vice-versa.

Remember that WD uses the phrase "5400-7200" to indicate variability within the product line, not the product.  Specifically, the 1TB drives are all 5400RPM fixed, not variable.

 

Doesn't really matter much except for the most demanding of applications, which unRaid is not one of them.

 

 

Bill

Basically, WD could ship these drives out as 7200rpm, and the labeling would still be correct.  They are most likely 5400rpm, but one day someone may find they got a 7200rpm instead.  I do wish they would simply list the actual speed, but oh well.

> I do wish they would simply list the actual speed, but oh well.

I do too...

Does anyone know if the 500GB's are 5400 or 7200 ?

 

I did a lot of reading about these drives.  The 750s and 1Ts are definitely 5400.  There was conjecture that the 500s were probably 5400 as well.