Get an 8TB USB 3.0 hard drive for just $100 at GameStop (with free shipping)

Looking for some external storage? You normally pay through the nose to get a super-high capacity drive, but right now GameStop are offering a capacious 8TB model for just $100. That’s helped the price of the same drive on Amazon, and works out to just 12.5 cents per gigabyte – a level of value you’d normally only expect to find on drives that are far smaller. The drive is called the ‘Seagate Game Drive Hub for Xbox’, but of course it works happily on PC too.

For the money, this is a ton of storage – the cheapest competing 8TB drive I can find on Amazon is another Seagate model for $142, and most options are closer to $200. Even if you don’t need the Xbox branding and the front-facing USB ports, the raw value here is off the charts. I’ve not ordered anything from GameStop in about 15 years, but assuming they’re not diabolical retailers I’d say this is a really good shout for anyone looking to beef up their external storage – whether to back up your PC’s files in case of disaster, to create a high capacity media server or just back up unused game directories to save having to re-download them on slow internet lines.

As you might expect from a high capacity external drive, people have tried ‘shucking’ them – that is, removing them from their enclosures to be used as an internal hard drive. This removes the USB bottleneck and allows for marginally faster access times, which can be useful for decreasing game loading times or if you want to use these in a NAS, for example. This also lets us know that these drives use SMR technology, a controversial technique for layering magnetic storage that allows for higher capacities but also results in slower sustained read/write speeds than traditional CMR drives. That makes this a better shout for archiving data – eg backing up game install directories or media – than using it as the drive from which you load games directly. Generally, we recommend using SSDs wherever possible due to their immense advantage in load times and responsiveness, but obviously that’s not practical for all people all the time, so consider yourself duly warned.

In terms of reliability, Seagate drives are a mixed bag. I’ve got friends that swear by them, and others that never buy them – and to be fair, the same is true for the other major hard drive maker, WD. This particular drive has a 4.8/5.0 rating on Amazon, with 46,000 reviews, but there are a few one star reviews that say the drives failed and that they weren’t able to get them replaced under warranty. Things ought to be different with GameStop, but it’s worth doing your own research to see if you’d prefer an alternative instead. For example, the most similar WD drive I can find is $180 and has about the same ratio of one-star reviews, for what it’s worth. If you have a particular model to recommend, do let me know in the comments!

One final thing: Xbox compatibility. I know we’re mainly interested in our PC gaming ’round these parts, but this will work for Xbox 360 (as far as I know!), Xbox One, Xbox One X, Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X. The caveat with Series X/S is that this will only run back-compat games or archive current-gen games. So you could download and run an Xbox One game on your Xbox Series X with this drive, no worries, likewise you could back up a Series X game to free up space on your internal storage, but you can’t play a Series X game from this drive directly as it’s not fast enough; instead, you’d need to copy the game from this drive to your Xbox’s internal storage. Makesense? OK, good.

So that just about does it. Let me know what you think in the comments, and stay tuned for more deals very soon!