Right now, Amazon is making it cheaper to get a ridiculous amount of storage. The online retailer is selling a WD Elements 16TB external hard drive for $270. That’s a savings of $180 off of the retailer’s MSRP.
This is a desktop hard drive, which means it requires its own power source instead of drawing power from a USB port. It’s also bigger than your average portable pocket drive.
WD doesn’t include a lot of extras with this drive, which might be a good thing for some folks. There’s no built-in hardware encryption and it doesn’t come with automatic backup software. Neither of those are huge losses for home users. There are tools to encrypt the drive if you want to and backup software is already built into Windows.
What you really want from this drive is the massive capacity. This is good for backing up all of your home PCs, a Plex media library, photos, raw video footage, extra console storage, or just a ridiculous amount of room for esports spreadsheets.
WD has equipped the Elements drive with a USB 3.0 connection. No word on the generation, but we’re guessing USB 3.1 Gen 1. This drive is formatted for NTFS, so Mac users will need to reformat the drive before using it.
[Today’s deal: 16TB WD Elements external hard drive for $270 at Amazon.]
Author: Ian Paul, Contributor
Ian is an independent writer based in Israel who has never met a tech subject he didn't like. He primarily covers Windows, PC and gaming hardware, video and music streaming services, social networks, and browsers. When he's not covering the news he's working on how-to tips for PC users, or tuning his eGPU setup.