Hard drives, with physically spinning platters, are kind of a thing of the past for most PC users. I don’t think I’ve seen a new laptop that uses a hard drive over an SSD in years, even in the ultra-budget category. But if you need absolutely outrageous amounts of disk space for long-term storage purposes, you still can’t beat an HDD.
And right now, you can get a gargantuan 28TB hard drive — yes, twenty-eight terabytes — on eBay for $389.99.
That’s so much storage that it’s hard for me to even imagine. I think every piece of information I’ve ever recorded in my life — every photo, video, article, novel, and hastily-completed college essay — wouldn’t fill up 28TB. According to some napkin math, I could fit all 400+ PC games in my Steam collection on it several times over. Of course, the big draw here is for HD video storage, other media projects, or server use cases. 28TB is enough to hold about 1,000 hours of 4K video, far less if you’re dealing with especially high-quality files.
The Seagate Exos hard drive on offer by ServerPart Deals is designed for just those kinds of tasks. It’s an old-school SATA desktop drive in 3.5-inch format at 7200RPM, suitable for servers or network-attached storage. While it’s refurbished by Seagate, it comes with a two-year seller warranty. If I were using it for critical storage reasons, I’d make sure it has a backup or redundancy setup… and now I’m thinking about a NAS packed with 56TB of storage. My god, it’s full of files.
Price comparisons are tricky when parts get this specialized. While this refurbished drive is currently on eBay for $389.99, you can find the same refurbished drive for a slightly lower $349.99 on Amazon, but it doesn’t come with a warranty — I’d spend the extra bucks. (Otherwise, you can get this brand-new 24TB drive for $439.99.)
This absolutely massive 28TB HDD is $390 with 2-year warranty