Tong Family

Well, there are some discounts that seem to be coming on and off. With all these price increases from NetFlix to Apple One to Disney, it’s nice to be able to save some money. As a reminder, there are historically low prices for SSDs and hard drives right now, so if you need them it’s a good time to load up. This will only last a month or so, but some incredible deals at OWC which does Mac-related products and accessories. I have a bunch of their gear and they’ve been around for a while. This is one site where it pays

OWC Deals: 96TB Thunderbay and Apple HomePod

OK, this is not for the faint of heart, but with the shift to needing good DAS (Direct Attached Storage) so that I can use the 1-year back with BackBlaze, I’ve been using a 15-year-old Drobo Pro (amazingly it still works pretty well although it is only USB 2 at 480Mbps). But, it is also noisy, and who knows how long it will last. The main problem is that sometimes when you start it doesn’t recognize the drive, but otherwise it is working decently well.

So I’ve been looking for a good scalable DAS system, the OWC Thunderbolt 8-drive is one I’ve been looking at. It is $799 with Software RAID and never goes on sale. But today in their Garage Sale, they are selling for $2.1K a 96TB populated drive. These have Toshiba 12TB drives that currently go for $250, so it’s like getting the chassis for free, there are only 18 of these in stock, but if you need essentially infinite storage this is a good deal.

Also if you are there and want to pick up an Apple HomePod Mini, they are on clearance for $65 which is a pretty good deal. They are supposed to be updated next year, but if you need one now this is not a bad Christmas present. We have about a dozen around the house and they seem a bit better with the new Home architecture but more importantly, they are very secure in that they keep things away from the great AI machines sucking up private data.

Paypal with Chase Freedom up to $1500 stack

The other great thing is that you can stack the great deals above with Chase Freedom which has a $1,500 and a 5x point bonus on PayPal. Because PayPal allows splitting payments, this means you can put $1,500 on that card and if you have a Chase Sapphire card, you can convert that to real points. That basically turns into a 5 points x 2 cents per point or another 10% discount which is nice.

Finally on Cashbackmonitor, you can use a site to get an additional 3% referral bonus from it. That’s nice.