The deal of the day might be this 4Tb my book external from wally world for $65.75?!
4TB for $66 is only $16.50, and WD MyBooks have 3 year warranty, and support encryption if you never wanna see your data again, haha!?
Looks like free shipping for USA. They left a big blue box on my porch just now with four of em.
16 TB for ~$264 delivered seems cheap enough to me!
https://www.walmart.com/ip/WD-4TB-My-Book-Desktop-External-Hard-Drive-USB-3-0-WDBBGB0040HBK-NESN/54296981WD 4TB My Book Desktop External Hard Drive - USB 3.0 - WDBBGB0040HBK-NESN
WDModel: WDBBGB0040HBK-NESNWalmart # 555998880
Average Rating:(4.2) stars out of 5 stars
84 ratings, based on 84 reviews, 128 comments
$65.75 (regularly $99.99)
Current SSD prices (late august 2021) are still at or under $100 for a SATA 1TB, because those don't have the performance that Chia-farming SSDs require.
So low end SSD's are also cheap in the NVME form factor, like the WD Black SN750 for $120 from newegg or BeastBuy
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-wd_black-sn750-nvme-gaming-1tb-pcie-gen-3-x4-internal-solid-state-drive/6338995.p?skuId=6338995WD - WD_BLACK SN750 NVMe Gaming 1TB PCIe Gen 3 x4 Internal Solid State Drive
Model:WDBRPG0010BNC-WRSN SKU:6338995
User rating, 4.9 out of 5 stars with 782 reviews, 55 Answered Questions
One big thing to watch with SSDs is the endurance. Some 1TB drives offer a lifetime use of 300 total TB written, others like this WD Black have 600 ttbw as their endurance rating.
The endurance specifications are often related to the length of the warranty but that is not always a reliable measure. * (see below for explanation of endurance language)
Another aspect of NVME drives is whether they contain onboard DRAM.
Models with a little onboard RAM can keep the active table of contents in there, and not have to constantly be writing small files and eating up product life, to put it bluntly.
*WD has this to say about how manufacturers report drive endurance:
https://blog.westerndigital.com/ssd-endurance-speeds-feeds-needs/The SSD Endurance Equation
SSD endurance is commonly described in terms of Drive Writes Per Day (DWPD) for a certain warranty period (typically 3 or 5 years). In other words, if a 1TB SSD is specified for 1 DWPD, it can withstand 1TB of data written to it every day for the warranty period. Alternatively, if a 1TB SSD is specified for 10 DWPD, it can withstand 10TB of data written to it every day for the warranty period.
Another metric used for SSD write endurance is Terabytes Written (TBW), which describes how much data can be written to the SSD over the life of the drive.
Converting between TBW and DWPD is simple:
DWPD to TBW: TBW = Capacity(TB) * DWPD * 365 * Warranty(Years)
TBW to DWPD: DWPD = TBW / (365 * Warranty(Years) * Capacity(TB) )