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Get a 4TB desktop hard drive for $70

Wow. Just, wow. Plus: a free ebook that teaches you how to code!

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
2 min read

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seagate-backup-plus-4tb-on-desk

Seagate's desktop drive holds a whopping 4TB.

Seagate

This is a rerun of sorts, though the last time I wrote about a mammoth hard drive with a minuscule price, it was a portable model. This one was designed to stay put.

Gather 'round, kids, and let me tell you what life was like way back in the 90s. Back then -- and I know this because 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.

Today, for a limited time and while supplies last, Best Buy has the Seagate Backup Plus 4TB external USB 3.0 hard drive for $69.99 shipped (plus tax). That's terabytes, people.

Are. You. Freaking. Kidding. Me?

Four terabytes for $70! (It's regularly $130.) Personally, I don't know what a person does with 4TB nowadays, though I can certainly speculate: video editing/storage, multiple full-system backups, maybe a big library of FLAC-encoded music. If you use a certain DVR service 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 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 should prove plenty fast at transferring files.

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wiley-coding-for-dummies
Wiley

The drive comes with a two-year warranty and has a 4.7-star average rating from Best Buy customers. 

Your thoughts?

Bonus deal: Coding is a highly marketable skill. Ready to learn? For a limited time, TradePub is offering the ebook edition of Wiley's "Coding for Dummies" for free -- in exchange for some personal/company information. Price you'd pay at  Amazon for the Kindle version: $16.

The 255-page book covers all the basics of writing code and hooks you up with online exercises. It has a 4.3-star rating from Amazon buyers.

As with all TradePub giveaways, you do have to supply some information about yourself, where you work and so on. However, this time out I connected to my LinkedIn account and zipped through the registration process lickety-split. YMMV.