Best Buy’s Black Friday sale has a great deal for those of us who need a lot of local data storage. You can get a WD EasyStore 18TB external hard drive for just $200, which is over 50% off the list price of $405. If you’re looking to upgrade your local storage, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a better deal. We recommend you grab this one before it goes out of stock.
As someone who has bought four 18TB drives in the last two years (don’t ask), I’ve been tracking the prices of these drives for a long time. You can usually find server or data center-grade 18TB drives for around $260 to $300, and those are internal hard drives. If you want an external drive that’s easy to plug in via USB, then the price often goes north of $300.
You can track these prices easily from ShuckStop, a site dedicated to tracking the prices of shucking-friendly external drives. “Shucking” is the act of disassembling external drives to remove the hard disk. It’s quite easy to do, but if there are any issues with the drive, you’ll have to reassemble the external drive before sending it in for servicing. Each of these external drives has an internal HDD that you can add to your PC or network-attached storage (NAS).
All of this to say that $200 for an 18TB drive, which can be removed from the enclosure, is a really good price. When buying large hard drives, $15 per TB is considered to be the sweet spot. This means that if you get an 18TB hard drive for $270, you’re getting fairly good value already. Best Buy’s deal puts the price of the drive at $11.11 per TB (before taxes), which is an excellent value.
You can plug this EasyStore 18TB into your PC or Mac and start backing up your data. Alternatively, you could consider shucking it at your own risk and use the drive with your PC or NAS.