Seagate's 16TB Expansion Desktop HDD drops to $449.99
High-capacity hard drives have grown expensive across the board, which makes Newegg's current discount on the 16TB Seagate Expansion Desktop notable. The drive is down $100 to $449.99 , which works out to roughly $0.02 per GB, a sensible figure given where HDD prices sit ahead of Prime Big Deal Days.
The cheapest new 16TB HDD currently available, is the IronWolf Pro at $599, a drive that is itself marked down 6 percent. A year ago, before high-capacity HDD prices began climbing, $500 bought roughly 28TB.
Today, the typical 16TB drive sells for around $700, and higher-end Exos models climb past $800. Within Seagate's own Expansion Desktop lineup, the 16TB model is the pick. The 12TB and 14TB versions cost more at $619.99 and $660 respectively, while the 26TB model lists at $1,179.99.
The Expansion Desktop connects over USB 3.0 and ships formatted to ExFAT, letting it run on virtually any platform without setup, and buyers remain free to reformat to any file system they prefer. As with most external drives, the exact unit inside the enclosure varies.
Performance expectations should be set accordingly. Most 5,400 RPM mechanisms sustain sequential reads and writes near 100 MB/s, and the USB 3.0 interface carries enough bandwidth to keep pace with the slower mechanism. For long-term storage, speed is not a concern.
The drive is shuckable, meaning the enclosure can be removed and the bare drive installed in a case for internal use. Doing so voids the warranty, a consideration worth weighing given how expensive HDDs have become.
Installed internally, the drive handles games, though it suits older titles best. Many recent AAA releases require solid-state storage, and even titles that fall back to mechanical storage, such as Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, perform poorly on slower 5,400 RPM hardware. Deals like this one do not always stick around long.
