Eric Ravenscraft
Plex is shutting down its Plex Cloud service on November 30th. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, you can still get a discount on Western Digital hard drives just for dropping $5 on a month of Plex Pass.
First, a little background. Plex Cloud is a feature of Plex that allows you to upload your own media to cloud storage providers like Dropbox or Google Drive, and then stream them to any of your Plex apps, like the one on your phone or smart TV. It sounded like a neat idea in theory, but in practice a hard drive on an always-on desktop or a NAS worked better. Plus, Plex was having trouble making it work in a cost-effective way. The company ended new sign ups for the feature back in February and now it’s killing the feature entirely by November 30th.
For most Plex users (and anyone who doesn’t use Plex), that may not mean a whole lot. However, a deal Plex is offering to compensate users can mean saving money for you. To help ease the transition to using your own local storage instead of something like Dropbox, Plex is partnering with Western Digital to offer Plex Pass subscribers a 20% discount on any hard drive you buy through WD’s online store. Even a 2TB hard drive from WD costs about $150, so that 20% discount amounts to $23 off. For a high-end, 6TB hard drive that costs $245, that discount gets you $50 off.
However, you don’t need to be an existing Plex Pass or Plex Cloud subscriber to get access to the discount. A one-month Plex Pass subscription costs $5 and immediately gives you access to this deal (at the Plex Pass Perks link here). So, if you’re in the market for a new hard drive and don’t care about Plex at all, you can still drop $5 to save up to $50. That might not be worth it for cheaper hard drives, but if you could use a few extra terabytes in your home server, this is a pretty good deal.
That being said, we’re pretty big fans of Plex to begin with. Plex Pass comes with a number of features that are appealing if you like to roll your own home entertainment system. If you’ve been on the fence about trying Plex, you can give that month of Plex Pass a shot and see if you like it. But even if you don’t care, $5 to save 20% on an expensive hard drive is nothing to sneeze at.
Source: Plex via Android Police
