Thrifty Thursday: Need cheap insurance for data? Stock up on these high-capacity drives

 

 

I am widely known in my friend/work circles as a complainer when it comes to storage: I never, ever have enough. I'm running two huge RAID arrays on my desk right now, and I'm almost filled (that's 40+ TB of total storage). As a video guy, constantly living in fear of running out of storage on my working drives is extremely stressful and is always on my mind. So why when I see a raging deal on long-term storage options, I jump on them. Today that's at Amazon with a very good deal on Seagate USB 3.0 hard drives. You can nab a 3TB drive for just $76, or do what I do and get several 8TB drives for $150. They're formatted for Windows out of the box, but can be reformatted for Mac if you're into that. 

Seagate Expansion 8TB Desktop External Hard Drive USB 3.0 (STEB8000100)

 

 

This kind of drive isn't what I would recommend for daily use or even repeated read/write. They are best suited, in my opinion, to being used as a second backup and placed on a shelf in case of emergencies. These drives are slower and obviously lower end (hence the price), and if you get the drive, run a reliability test on them and if that comes out green, you should be good to fill it and shelve it. There is a warranty on these drives, but it's only for one year. I recommend backing these up redudantly in case of any failure. 

All that said, it's really hard to beat this kind of pricing for that kind of huge storage capacity. It's a really good deal by most any metric.