Long-term storage of photos and videos creates a dilemma that most people solve expensively through monthly cloud subscriptions or by purchasing fast but pricey SSDs. Here’s the reality: you don’t need blazing transfer speeds for archiving memories you’ll access occasionally. What you need is massive capacity at a reasonable price, and traditional hard disk drives deliver exactly that value proposition.
The Seagate 20TB external drive gives you an enormous amount of space for storing years worth of family photos and backup files without the recurring costs of cloud storage or the premium pricing of solid-state alternatives. Prime Big Deal Day has slashed this drive to $229 from its original $499 price, representing more than 50% off and creating an all-time low for this capacity. This Prime-exclusive offer expires tonight when Amazon’s promotional event closes.
Practical Storage for Archives
Smartphones today capture 4K video that takes up gigabytes per minute and high-def photos from today’s cameras easily surpass 25MB per shot. A week-long family vacation can amass 100GB of content before you know it. With 20TB at your disposal, you get storage for approximately 5 million average-sized photos or about 2,500 hours of Full HD video.
The USB 3.0 interface reads transfer rates of around 120-160 MB/s when dealing with sequential file operations which means that you can transfer a 100GB folder in around 10-15 minutes. It will feel slow compared to today’s SSDs reaching 1,000 MB/s or faster, remember your actual use case scenario: you’re performing large one-time moves of photo libraries or full-system backups, then plugging the drive into the machine or storing the drive securely.
The mechanical hard disk technology on the inside is mature, tried and tested storage that’s been perfected over decades. HDDs can’t compete with the shock resistance and speed of SSDs, but they provide exponentially better cost per gigabyte for the very biggest capacities. They’re therefore perfect for write-once, read-occasionally data such as photo archives or system backups you hope never to have to use but like to keep on hand should disaster befall you.
Seagate includes Rescue Data Recovery Services on this drive which provides professional data recovery assistance should the drive fail mechanically. This is the salvation of potentially thousands of dollars’ worth of irreplaceable videos and images that will be forever lost without it. A limited warranty is also included and offers another type of protection that will provide you with redress should hardware issues occur during the course of the coverage.
Data management effectiveness is derived from the presence of sufficient storage to accommodate appropriate backup strategies. The 3-2-1 rule is one that recommends that you have three copies of critical data with two on distinct types of media and one off-site. This 20TB unit can be your local primary backup as you keep working files on the internal drive on your computer and potentially keep significant things in selective cloud storage.
For $229 as part of a 20TB bundle, you’re shelling out approximately 1.1 cents per gigabyte which is one of the lowest methods through which you can archive giant data libraries. Note, this Prime Big Deal Day deal ends tonight.
