Storing large amounts of data offline comes down to a fundamental choice between two technologies. SSDs offer blazing speed but come with premium price tags that can hurt your wallet, while traditional HDDs sacrifice some performance in exchange for massive storage capacity at a fraction of the cost.
If you’re willing to trade a bit of speed for significantly more space, Western Digital’s 14TB external hard drive is currently hitting an all-time low on Amazon during Prime Big Deal Days at $169, down from its usual $279 price (40% off). To put this in perspective, a comparable 14TB SSD would set you back between $1,500 and $2,000, and you’d gain speed but nothing else. For most users backing up photos or documents, that speed difference doesn’t justify paying ten times more.
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Best in Class HDD
The sheer capacity of 14TB transforms how you think about digital storage: This isn’t a drive where you constantly delete old files to make room for new ones. With 14TB, you can store approximately 3.5 million high-resolution photos at 4 megabytes each, or around 3,000 hours of Full HD video or massive game libraries that would choke smaller drives.
The USB 3.0 interface moves data at rates of up to 5 gigabits per second on paper, which translates to real-world speeds of around 100-120 megabytes per second depending on your hardware and file type. That’s not quite as quick as current modern SSD speeds of 500+ MB/s but it’s quicker than enough for your average backup and archival workloads. Moving a 50GB folder takes around 7-8 minutes compared to under a minute for an SSD, but it’s a good trade-off given how much money you’re shelling out.
Plug-and-play functionality is a matter of plugging in the drive by USB and it is registered instantly on Windows and Mac platforms, no driver installs, and no formatting required. The pre-formatted Windows format of the drive is NTFS but Mac owners are able to reformat it to exFAT or even APFS, in minutes for guaranteed compatibility.
The unit is actually powered externally by an AC adapter instead of tapping off of the USB bus for current. The external powering is what grants the drive its ability to work at full capacity and isn’t held back by USB bus current limits, and it helps to remove drives off of laptop batteries during long transfers. The adapter, though, must itself be plugged into a wall outlet, so it’s a genuine desktop solution and not a transportable package stuffed into a briefcase.
The form factor is suitable for a semi-permanent/permanent installation for a home office/studio setup. You can sit it right next to your computer as a specialty backup drive, set automatic backups by Time Machine for Mac or by File History for Windows and leave it quietly accumulating copies of your irreplaceable data.
At $169 for its Prime Big Deal Days sale, this Western Digital 14TB HDD offers unmatched value per terabyte. That’s around $12 per terabyte, which is dazzling for a major-brand drive by a company known for reliability like Western Digital.
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