Gamers looking for fast, reliable storage without breaking the bank can consider a recent discount on Best Buy’s 20TB SKU of the Seagate Expansion external hard drive. The hard drive, priced at $230, is trading at an effective $50 discount over its previous sticker price while offering a generous price per gigabyte of 1.15 cents, making it one of the cheapest external hard drives money can buy.
And with games increasingly leaning toward digital-only media, it’s not a bad time to invest in an external hard drive, whether it’s for screenshots, video captures, or games themselves.
Related
Gunnar Dume Glasses Review: Stylish Blue Light Protection with Some Trade-Offs
The Gunnar Dume glasses offer a stylish aviator design with effective blue light filtering, but how does the amber tint perform?
What Does The Seagate Expansion HDD Offer To Gamers?
The 20TB Seagate Expansion External Hard Drive offers a USB-C adapter rated for USB 3.0 Gen1 speeds, which makes it more than adequate for copying data back and forth from PCs and consoles as a standalone backup device. It comes with Seagate’s Rescue Data Recovery Services in case users lose data, something that is great for peace of mind.
The 20 terabytes of storage on offer means that even assuming a generous average game install size of 40GB each, the Expansion drive should easily cater to as many as 500 titles. Most games sit around the 10-20GB mark lately, but there are exceptions, such as Call of Duty’s recent releases as well as Fortnite, which take up hundreds of gigabytes of storage, making this a one-size-fits-all solution that caters to all but the largest game libraries.
It does have its drawbacks versus SSD drives, such as read and write speeds, which are a fraction of most portable SSDs on the market. But it does work well as an external drive for most general-purpose use cases. This also makes it ideal to use with last-generation consoles such as the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One platforms.
The unit comes with an 18W power adapter, a USB 3.0 cable, and a quick start guide in the box, making it easy to plug into a wall socket without having to worry about adequate power via a console’s USB ports. This could be particularly important for smaller consoles like the Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch, both of which might be considerably limited by battery life when using a portable HDD or SSD.
Related
Limited Time Deal On HP Color Laserjet Pro Printer, 18% Off
The HP MFP 3301 Laserjet printer has received an 18% price drop for a short period.
What Are The Limitations Of The Seagate Expansion External Drive?
The Seagate Expansion external drive is a great all-rounder, but it does have its limitations versus some of its competition. For starters, while its speeds are great for most users, they might be a bit too slow for users regularly moving their game libraries across consoles, PCs, and similar platforms. It also does have a portability limitation thanks to a physical power adapter – the 18-watt charger can be an issue, especially when trying to use it with a portable console thanks to the requirement for a power outlet.
At the same time, current-generation consoles such as the PS5 and Xbox Series X are more than happy to use the drive as a storage medium but do not allow playback off it. This is because modern consoles employ faster internal and external SSDs under the hood and games are designed to expect similar read/write speeds.
This makes the Seagate expansion great from a storage perspective, but a rather limited option as a storage extension for most users.
More
Last Chance: Get Amazon’s 50-inch 4K Smart TV at Just $299.99
Amazon’s 50-inch 4-Series 4K UHD smart TV is still available for a little bit today at the remarkable $299.99 price.