Digital storage needs spiral out of control faster than you can keep up with them, and watching your available space shrink while cloud subscription costs climb month after month creates a frustrating cycle that never ends.
Seagate has lost its mind with the pricing on its 20TB Expansion HDD, slashing it to $229 from the $499 launch price which creates the situation where this massive drive costs less than the 12TB model still sitting at $299 on Amazon. You’re paying around $0.01 per gigabyte, half the launch cost and roughly ten times cheaper than equivalent SSD storage for this kind of capacity.
When Mechanical Beats Solid State on Value
SSDs dominate performance conversations with their 2,000 MB/s transfer speeds and instant access times, but when you need to store 20 terabytes of data, the math shifts dramatically in favor of mechanical drives: A 2TB SSD runs $150 to $200 (putting it at $0.07 to $0.10 per gigabyte) while this Seagate unit delivers the same price for ten times the capacity.
This Seagate drive pushes data at 220 to 246 MB/s over USB 3.0 which handles large backup operations, media library management and archive storage without breaking a sweat since you’re not booting operating systems or running applications from external storage anyway. Moving a 50GB file takes roughly four to five minutes which is perfectly adequate for transferring weekend photo shoots or shuffling game installations between drives.
The quoted capacity of 20TB provides ample capacity for the retention of more than 5 million high-definition images at 3.5MB each, 4,000 hours of video at 1080p resolution, or 50 full game copies of 100GB on average. The drive comes pre-formatted with exFAT and allows it to work seamlessly with both Windows computers and computers from Apple without needing to format it once.
The setup process could not be simpler since you simply attach the 18-inch USB 3.0 cable from the drive’s micro-USB connector to your computer’s USB port and attach the 18W power adaptor to an electrical outlet. The set comes with international plug adapters that fit on the power brick; thus, various electrical outlets found in different nations won’t pose a problem. No need to install anything on your system since the process of getting underway happens in less than a minute as you simply drag files from your system to the drive icon on your desktop to copy them or drag them back to retrieve them.
The drive has the advantage of supporting backward compatibility on older ports of version 2.0. However, data transfer rates on these ancient interfaces become 30 to 40 MB/s. The power gadget uses wall current as opposed to drawing power from the universal bus. As such, the drive has unrestricted access to 7200 RPM on 3.5-inch disks without reducing laptop power without overstressing the power output on USB connections.
The data recovery services from Seagate come free with every purchase for professional data recovery needed in the worst of circumstances of drive failure and comes at an added cost of $500-$2,000. The limited lifetime hardware parts and labor warranty given by the company insures that the buyer can get a replacement should anything fail within a year of purchase.
The competitive pricing of this offer makes it even more impressive since Western Digital’s 20TB drives usually starts at $400 and enterprise-oriented solutions from companies like G-Technology cost $400-$500. In comparison to that, the lowest-priced category of drives like the reviewed Seagate solution offers the same capacity and speed at a way more affordable price.
