16TB Western Digital Elements External Hard Drive | $270 | Amazon
I’m looking scornfully at my dinky little 2TB desktop drive right now after seeing this deal on a Western Digital Elements external drive with eight times as much storage for only $270—that’s a $180 discount from its usual price of $450. This external drive comes with its own enclosure, and supports both USB 2.0 and USB3.0 via the funky, bumpy USB Micro-B cable that’s not the same thing as the Micro USB cable all Android phones used before most of them made the jump to USB-C. I had to look up what that connector type was called, and was very upset to learn about its confusing name that’s seemingly impossible to Google for.
Western Digital doesn’t say what the transfer speeds are, but I would expect something upwards of 180MB/s sequential reads and writes over USB 3.0, given that’s what WD’s drives are typically capable of. This is a great price for such a high-capacity drive, and it looks like it’s also the cheapest it’s been—it’s certainly cheaper than other similar offerings. And to save you a visit to the Q&A section of that page: this is strictly an external drive in a fancy enclosure. If you’re looking for a Network Attached Storage device, keep looking, pal.