Given the current lock down economy, and watching sales on ebay, I don't think the deal is about to poof. Better odds it gets better maybe with free shipping.
I agree. OTOH, once they're gone, they're probably gone, as far as getting one of these families of NAS units "New", for a reasonable price. (Closeout price)
I did get an IX4 4-bay unit, for $110 shipped. Still haven't opened it. Hope that I didn't make a mistake, if it truly has a 16TB volume limit. Plus the lack (relatively) of performance in terms of transfer speeds. The IX family was never great in that dept.
But it is (or was) "stupid cheap" for a workable 4-bay NAS, around $100. "New" even. But I wonder if I was "stupid" to even buy something that old, and EOL. I mean, heck, the drive interface is SATAII. Not SATA6G.
Shrug. Maybe I'll pawn off one of my new (Euro-version) IX2-DL units on a friend. I keep trying to get him interested in networking, 3rd-party router firmwares, and NAS units, for his backup storage. He doesn't seem that motivated to step out of his comfort zone, and learn those things, just yet. But I have some faith that he will, eventually. He learned how to build his own PCs, and taught himself Linux, so he's far from stupid. He just doesn't "see the light" of the "power of NAS" yet. Perhaps when he gets multiple PCs and laptops running, and sees the benefit of having a whole-LAN solution for a backup destination, and allowing them to run automagically to the NAS, that he'll change his mind.
Or possibly, I'll get a client someday that needs a cheap starter NAS units for backup duty, and doesn't want to splash out for a $400-500 4-bay QNAP, plus 4x $100 for some 4TB WD Red NAS drives, or $230 ea., for some 8TB NAS drives.
(I personally buy the WD EasyStore units from BestBuy on ebay, and shuck them. If they don't have warranty, I don't care. They're cheap enough, usually, to obtain that way, that you can simply buy an extra one, for what you would pay for "bare drive, with warranty" price on Newegg for WD Reds.)
I've also found, occasionally, WD themselves on ebay, selling factory refurb external desktop HDDs, and shucking those as well. SUPER-cheap. ($60 for 4TB.) With RAID-5 or RAID-1 for redundancy, I don't worry so much about individual drives failing.