Seagate 20TB External Hard Drive Now Costs $0.10 per GB, 50% Cheaper than Launch Price - Kotaku

"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."

"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."

Rapidly increasing personal and professional storage demands make low-cost, high-capacity drives attractive. Seagate’s 20TB Expansion external HDD is discounted to $229 from $499, producing about $0.01 per gigabyte and undercutting smaller-capacity models. Mechanical storage becomes more cost-effective than SSDs for massive archives despite SSDs offering much higher transfer speeds. The drive achieves 220–246 MB/s over USB 3.0, suitable for backups and media libraries, and moves a 50GB file in roughly four to five minutes. The 20TB capacity supports millions of images, thousands of hours of 1080p video, or dozens of full games, and ships pre-formatted as exFAT for plug-and-play with Windows and macOS.

Read at Kotaku