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With the increasing popularity of the best SSDs, many people have started writing off hard drives as something in the past. That’s a mistake: the best hard drives offer massive amounts of storage at prices that SSDs just can’t match. If you have a massive library of music, video, or even photos, it’s a good idea to look to a traditional hard drive for all your archiving needs.
Regardless of what you need the storage for, no one wants to pay full price for what is essentially old technology, useful as it is. As with any type of PC hardware, the MSRP is more of a guideline than a hard and fast rule.
Luckily, here at TechRadar, we’ve scoured hundreds of deals across the web to find the best hard drive deals so you don’t miss out on the best deals this week.
Best Hard Drive Deals
Seagate takes the spot for the best hard drive deal, with their BarraCuda drives striking the perfect balance between storage, speed, and price. The 3TB drives in this lineup are a particularly good deal, as they really hit that sweet spot between high-density storage and a nice 7,200 RPM spin speed. And they do this while maintaining a price significantly lower than their direct competition.
So if you’re looking for a light archiving drive, or a main drive and don’t want to take the plunge on an SSD, the BarraCuda is a good choice as it can reach read speeds of up to 190MB. /s which is more than enough for everyday computing.
Best deal on gaming hard drives
When it comes to gaming, speed is the number one priority. No one wants to play their favorite PC games only to encounter excruciating loading times. That’s where the WD VelociRaptor drives really excel. These slick discs offer a blistering 10,000 RPM, so you spend less time loading and more time playing.
Better yet, they offer a much better price per gigabyte than even budget SSDs, so if you want to reduce your downtime, you can do so while still saving a few bucks.
Best deal on hybrid hard drives
Hybrid drives combine the best aspects of both SSDs (solid state drives) and hard drives, providing high storage density while also providing the speed of an SSD for the data you use most. The Seagate FireCuda desktop drives take this formula and perfect it by recording 2 TB of data with 8 GB of smart flash memory. That may seem like a small amount of SSD space, but it learns and stores which files and applications you use most, so you can access them faster than a standard HDD.
And now, with the increasing ubiquity of SSDs, there’s never been a better time to snag a deal on the FireCuda – as with other SSHDs, prices are constantly dropping.
Best laptop hard drive deal
Nowadays it is becoming more and more common for laptops to be built with SSDs. While this is great if you’re not necessarily looking for large amounts of storage space, anyone who needs a lot of space to work will get stuck paying an extremely high premium. Fortunately, the HGST Travelstar solves this problem by offering 1 TB of storage with a spin speed of 7,200 RPM at a very modest price.
Available in 750GB and 1TB variants, the Travelstar is a great deal for anyone looking for a great hard drive in their laptop.
Best external hard drive deal
Do you travel a lot for work or school? Well, if so, the WD Elements line of external drives might just be perfect for you. Not only do these drives offer a great price per gigabyte, but they’re also small enough to carry around with ease.
Not only do the WD Elements line offer high storage capacity and high portability, but they also offer a lower price point than the competition, making it a great buy for anyone who needs to carry their work around with them.