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Add 6TB of storage and a USB hub to your desktop for $114.99

Seagate's external hard drive has never been this cheap. Plus: an interesting accessory for your Echo Dot and two more awesome CNET giveaways!

Rick Broida Senior Editor
Rick Broida is the author of numerous books and thousands of reviews, features and blog posts. He writes CNET's popular Cheapskate blog and co-hosts Protocol 1: A Travelers Podcast (about the TV show Travelers). He lives in Michigan, where he previously owned two escape rooms (chronicled in the ebook "I Was a Middle-Aged Zombie").
Rick Broida
3 min read

CNET's Cheapskate scours the web for great deals on PCs, phones , gadgets and much more. Questions about the Cheapskate blog? Find the answers on our FAQ page. Find more great buys on the CNET Deals page and follow the Cheapskate on Facebook and Twitter!


seagate-backup-plus-6tb
Seagate

"Oh, boy, here goes Rick again, telling crazy stories about what life was like back in his day...."

Back in my day, when I worked for a mail-order computer company (which was a thing), it was a pretty big deal when you could buy a 250MB internal hard drive for $250.

That's megabytes, people. For those unacquainted with the measurement, 250MB is equivalent to one-fourth of a gigabyte.

Today, for a limited time and while supplies last, Amazon has the Seagate Backup Plus Hub 6TB external USB 3.0 hard drive for $114.99 shipped. That's terabytes, people.

That. Is. Incredible.

Six terabytes for $115! (It's regularly $200, and priced at $160 most other places.) Personally, I don't know what a person does with that much space, though I can certainly speculate: Video editing/storage, multiple full-system backups, maybe a big library of FLAC-encoded music.

Likewise, if you use a certain online DVR service (which I'm not allowed to name; look it up) to save movies and TV shows for offline viewing, a drive like this would hold a lot of movies and TV shows. And all those videos you're shooting with your phone, but don't actually have room for on your phone? Offload them to this.

As you might expect from the name, the Backup Plus Hub was built with archiving in mind. It comes with software that can automate the process while also preserving media you've shared on sites like Facebook and Flickr. Thanks to the USB 3.0 interface, it's plenty fast at transferring files.

And speaking of USB, it serves up two powered USB 3.0 ports, meaning it not only replaces the desktop/laptop port it's using, but also adds an extra -- both of them front-facing and easily accessible.

The drive comes with a two-year warranty and has a 4.1-star average rating from over 1,100 Amazon customers. 

Your thoughts?

znewtech-led-clock-for-echo-dot-2nd-gen

The one thing your Dot doesn't have: a clock!

Znewtech

Bonus deal: Feel like your Amazon Echo Dot is missing something? Namely, a big, bright LED clock? Here's your chance to score the Znewtech LED clock for Echo Dot (2nd gen) for $25.19 when you apply promo code cheapskate at checkout. (That should work for both the black and white models.)

It's not much of a discount, alas, but mostly I just wanted to bring the product to your attention. If you keep your Dot on your nightstand (and here are six reasons you should), this is kind of like the missing piece of the puzzle: The visual clock. To that end, it has a brightness-adjustment dial that can dim the display considerably.

This is not, however, an alarm (because the Dot can already do that, duh), nor is it a secondary speaker. It's just an LED clock, one designed to tuck your 2nd-gen Dot inside. Maybeit's a tad overpriced for what it is, even with the discount, but I suspect there are some folks who'd rather see a clock than a little faceless puck.

Giveaways! Hopefully by now you've entered yesterday's Cheapskate giveaway, which could net you a Google Pixel 2 XL and an entire year of US Mobile service. But, wait, there's more: Roadshow is giving you the chance to win a Garmin Speaks Plus for your car, while CNET's Apple Byte sweepstakes will award two lucky winners an Apple HomePod .

Good luck!