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Get a rare deal on a shuckable 16TB Seagate Expansion Desktop drive at $0.02 per GB
A surprisingly decent value when high-capacity HDDs are into four digits.
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The AIpocolypse has consumed everything in its path, including the once-affordable high-capacity HDD. Newegg has a rare deal on a high-capacity 16TB external Seagate drive, knocking $100 off the price to bring it down to $449.99. That comes out to around $0.02 per GB, which is surprisingly sensible given HDD prices right now.
The cheapest 16TB HDD we can find new right now is the IronWolf Pro at $599, which itself is on sale for 6% off. Around this point last year, before HDD prices started soaring, you'd be able to pick up around 28TB for $500. Now, most 16TB drives are around $700, with higher-end Exos drives pushing up above $800.
If you prefer internal storage, you can remove the enclosure, extract the drive, and put it in a case. Note that doing so will void your warranty, so although it's possible, you might want to rethink that move given how expensive HDDs are right now.
The Seagate Expansion Desktop drive is a 16TB HDD that connects via USB 3.0. It's formatted to ExFAT by default, allowing it to work with virtually platform out of the box.
As with most external drives, the actual drive inside of the enclosure varies. Seagate doesn't list the speed of the drive inside, though many external HDDs run at 5,400 RPM. User reports online have shown both Barracuda and IronWolf Pro drives inside the Expansion Desktop, so naturally, your milage will vary.
You shouldn't expect great speeds from this drive. Most 5,400 RPM drives offer sustained sequential reads and writes around 100 MB/s. Thankfully, the USB 3.0 interface offers plenty of bandwidth to keep up with the slower drive. For long-term storage, speed shouldn't be an issue.
If you install the drive internally, you can use it for games, though you should stick to older titles. A lot of modern AAA games require an SSD, and even titles with HDD fallback like Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart struggle on slower 5,400 RPM drives.
Seagate ships the drive formatted to ExFAT, so it'll work with virtually any platform out of the box. Of course, you're free to reformat the drive to any file system you want.