You can scoop up a beefy 24 TB HDD for less than 1₵ per GB in the Prime Day sales, proving that old school hard drives are still alive and kicking

SSDs are great; long-lasting and fast, they’re fantastic for games. However, such hardy storage media often comes at a premium that scales up and up the more space you need. My point is, in this era of very spenny SSD-dominance, perhaps it’s time to spare a thought for the humble, high-capacity HDD.

A typical hard disk drive is nowhere near as fast as today’s solid state drives, making them an unsuitable choice for installing modern games. However, they’re a great place to stash files you need nearby but not necessarily in a hurry. Whether you’re backing up photos or simply need somewhere to move your Steam backlog (which you tell yourself you will get to one day, honest), the 24 TB version of the Seagate BarraCuda 3.5-inch hard drive is an excellent choice—especially as it’s now only $240 at Newegg.

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You simply won’t see a SSD with a similarly large storage capacity at such a reasonable price—this is still one arena where HDDs have SSDs beat. It also doesn’t hurt that the name of this 3.5-inch internal drive also calls to mind a certifiable 70s banger.

My throwback playlist aside, let’s briefly talk specs. I’ve already said how picking up a HDD is opting for the slower, more budget-conscious option, but just how slow are we talking? The BarraCuda itself is advertised with a SATA 6 Gb/s interface optimised for “burst performance.” That’s gigabits, not gigabytes, for reference.

What that means practically is that the BarraCuda still offers a respectable enough speed for file transfers here and there. That’s fine if you’re just moving the odd, small game between this hard drive and your faster, internal SSD. However, given it may not even maintain that speed under lengthier loads, you may end up waiting around if you decide to move, say, your entire private media library at once.

Let me put this another way: moving Baldur’s Gate 3, a massive game clocking in at just under 150 GB, will take almost four minutes to transfer from this HDD under optimal conditions. That’s not bad, but it is slow compared to SSD speeds. For instance, the overall best SSD for gaming is the WD Black SN7100, which offers a sequential read speed of up to 7250 MB/s (or 7.25 gigabytes, rather than bits, per second).

Given how long it took me to download Baldur’s Gate 3 over a creaky internet connection, I think getting up and making a brew in the time it takes for such a beefy game file to transfer between physical storage media is vastly preferable.

Combine that with the massive 24 TB capacity you’re getting for under $250, and I think HDDs still have a lot to offer to those with big files to move but more restrictive budgets to spend.