Seagate Expansion 8TB external hard drive review: No frills storage in need of USB-C

JP234 said:
Sure, 8TB is impressive. But do you know anyone who would commit 8TB of important data on a single drive? At this capacity, the only logical choice is a 5 bay, level 5 RAID with 2TB drives with hot swap redundant capability if one fails. Sure, it's going to cost 2-3 times as much, but what's 8 TB of your data worth, anyway?

If your data is truly vitally important, consider also the need to have a geographically-diverse backup as well.  Unfortunately, for many, backing up online takes a significant amount of time due to asymmetric download/upload speeds with their internet connections, and limited monthly transfer quotas.

But if you don’t add too much new data too fast, that’s sufficiently workable without shipping hard drives or media around.

There are two main types of drive owners: those that have lost data due to some sort of failure, and those that will lose data, given long enough usage.  As I’ve not gotten into storing videos or creating them as a regular thing, I’ve not bothered getting a hard drive or SSD more than 1 TB in size since 2010 because I’ve not found a need for that much on a device.  Storage capacity has gone up faster than the combination of how much space most people will use before a drive tends to fail from age and use, so it’s a curious balance to be struck.