Get the Seagate 8TB Game Drive for $100 (was $200)
As you might expect from a high capacity external drive, people have tried ‘shucking’ them - that is, removing them from their enclosures to be used as an internal hard drive. This removes the USB bottleneck and allows for marginally faster access times, which can be useful for decreasing game loading times or if you want to use these in a NAS, for example. This also lets us know that these drives use SMR technology, a controversial technique for layering magnetic storage that allows for higher capacities but also results in slower sustained read/write speeds than traditional CMR drives. That makes this a better shout for archiving data - eg backing up game install directories or media - than using it as the drive from which you load games directly. Generally, we recommend using SSDs wherever possible due to their immense advantage in load times and responsiveness, but obviously that’s not practical for all people all the time, so consider yourself duly warned.
One final thing: Xbox compatibility. I know we’re mainly interested in our PC gaming ‘round these parts, but this will work for Xbox 360 (as far as I know!), Xbox One, Xbox One X, Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X. The caveat with Series X/S is that this will only run back-compat games or archive current-gen games. So you could download and run an Xbox One game on your Xbox Series X with this drive, no worries, likewise you could back up a Series X game to free up space on your internal storage, but you can’t play a Series X game from this drive directly as it’s not fast enough; instead, you’d need to copy the game from this drive to your Xbox’s internal storage. Make sense? OK, good.
So that just about does it. Let me know what you think in the comments, and stay tuned for more deals very soon!
