My current external drive is making this horrible clicking sound and I am freaking out because all my family photos and Plex media are on it. I am honestly so fed up with these cheap portable drives dying on me every two years, it is driving me insane. I need to upgrade to a real NAS setup like yesterday but my budget is tight, I really cant spend more than 400 bucks for the enclosure.
So I was thinking of holding out for the Amazon Prime Day deals since that is coming up soon, my logic was that maybe the Synology DS923+ or something similar would get a decent discount. But I am so anxious that this drive is gonna completely bite the dust before July. Like is it even worth waiting for Prime Day for NAS deals? Do they actually put the good 4-bay enclosures on sale or is it just older junk they want to clear out?
If anyone remembers what the discounts were like last year or has a hunch for 2026 please let me know. I am in the US and need to make a move soon before I lose everything...
TL;DR: Do not wait for Prime Day. A clicking drive is a dying drive, and it wont survive until July. Plus, Prime Day discounts on decent 4-bay units are historically pretty weak (usually just 10% to 15% off at most). I learned this lesson the hard way about five years ago. I had an external drive making that exact same clicking noise. I decided to stretch it out for a month to wait for a holiday sale. Big mistake. The drive seized up completely, and I ended up spending almost a thousand bucks on a professional data recovery service just to get my family photos back. It was painful. Over the years, Ive watched the Prime Day sales closely. They rarely discount the good stuff like the Synology DiskStation DS923+ 4-Bay NAS by much. If they do, it sells out in seconds. Also, since you mentioned Plex, you should actually look at the Synology DiskStation DS423+ 4-Bay NAS instead. The DS923+ uses an AMD processor which lacks integrated graphics, meaning it sucks at Plex hardware transcoding. The DS423+ has the Intel Celeron chip with QuickSync, which handles Plex transcodes like a champ. Buy a cheap external drive today, back up your photos immediately, and then grab your NAS. Dont risk your data for a hypothetical fifty-dollar discount.
