If you’re looking to expand your local storage by a significant amount, the back to school season offers a great opportunity. I’ve posted a few deals on high-capacity local storage recently, but this is probably the best deal yet. For a limited time, Best Buy is offering a massive Seagate Expansion 26TB USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive for $249.99 shipped, which averages out to $9.62 per TB. This is the first time I’ve seen a drive priced at under $10 per TB this year.
The Seagate Expansion boasts a single 26TB disk drive so it’s physically no bigger than any other desktop hard drive. It features a USB 3.0 interface, which won’t bottleneck traditional hard drive speeds, and a USB 3.0 cable is included in the packaging. It also includes recovery software and automatic recognition of both Windows and Mac computers.
Although SSDs are all the rage these days, traditional hard drives are still the superior choice for long term storage. For one, hard drives are significantly less expensive. Compared to this hard drive’s $9.262/TB cost, a solid state drive would run you at least $60/TB. Hard drives also have a much higher maximum capacity. Consumer SSDs generally cap out at 8TB, which pales in comparison to the 26TB capacity of this drive. Perhaps most importantly, although SSDs can equal HDDs in terms of lifespan, it’s much easier to recover data from a HDD than SSD if either one fails.
Looking for more alternatives? Check out the best external hard drives of 2025.
Eric Song is the IGN commerce manager in charge of finding the best gaming and tech deals every day. When Eric isn’t hunting for deals for other people at work, he’s hunting for deals for himself during his free time.
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