Get a 16TB Seagate Exos HDD (refurb) for $200 (new price $272)
Most refurbished drives tend to be ones that have been barely used, and verifying this is as easy as loading up an app to see what power on count and power on hours are reported by the SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) system embedded on every drive. If the drive reports any errors or a high usage time, then you can just return the drive. This $200 price is for drives that is in ’excellent condition’, so getting customer service on your side is pretty straightforward in my experience! So why this drive in particular? Well, apart from the massive capacity, this drive is part of Seagate’s enterprise lineup, with a relatively high 7200RPM rotation speed and generous 256MB cache. Hard drives are still massively slower than SSDs, especially when it comes to access times, but in turn they’re also an order of magnitude more affordable when it comes to high capacity options. To get 16TB of SSD storage, you’d be looking at two Samsung 870 Qvo drives that cost $700 each, so I’d definitely go with the HDD option here! In any case, if you like having a very large game collection on hand - or you just want to keep a digital copy of every record, CD, videotape and DVD you own - then this is an awesome amount of storage for the money.
