After RAM and SSD, hard drives have been the next victim of the ruthless AI-pocalypse beast.
Amazon cut $150 off the price of this large external 24TB Seagate drive, now down to $679.99. It's got the same price tag over at Best Buy, too.
That is around $0.03 per GB, the cheapest in the market right now for this capacity during Amazon October Prime Day.
Why I recommend this deal
Outside of this drive, the cheapest new 24TB HDD you can buy new right now is the Seagate Skyhawk AI 24TB, for $1,029 or $0.04 per GB, a full 51% more expensive.
High capacity HDD are few and far between and the major retailers are only stocking refurbished models from Toshiba, WD and Seagate.
You should be able to extract the drive from the enclosure although doing so will void your warranty entirely (albeit a short 1-year one).
Buying from Amazon also allows you to buy a 3-year data recovery plan for just $14.99 which means you could get a brand new 24TB drive if your drive gives up the ghost at month 35. This is definitely a worthy investment.
Seagate also bundles its own award-winning Rescue Data Recovery Services for the first year. Ironically, its own internal HDDs have at least two years' warranty (and up to five).
What you need to know
This 24TB Seagate Expansion Desktop drive is the cheapest large capacity HDD right now. It's formatted to ExFAT by default which means it is compatible with Windows, Linux and Mac out of the box.
The drive inside the enclosure is likely to be either a Barracuda or an IronWolf Pro (we reviewed the 20TB and the 30TB models). Both have a 7200 RPM spinning speed and use conventional magnetic recording (CMR) technology rather than the more controversial SMR.
Compared to slower 5400RPM drives (which tend to be present on smaller external HDDs), a 7200RPM drives will have a much high data transfer rate. Seagate quotes up to 190 MB/s in read performance. That’s low enough for USB 3.0 to cope with and as an external backup, it should be plenty fast.
Speaking of backup, don’t forget the 3-2-1 rule to keep your data safe.
Three: There needs to be three copies of the data. The original, plus two copies of it.
Two: The data needs to be stored on at least two different types of media.
One: At least one of these copies should not be stored in the same location as the other two, and should be offsite.
Check our best cloud storage and best cloud backup buying guides to choose the perfect complement to your external backup storage to avoid future headaches.
Also consider
Read more: We're currently live-tracking all the best Prime Day home office deals.
