This is essentially disassembling the external HDD and reusing the hard drive inside either in an array or in a desktop computer. This price difference, then, gave rise to a popular technique known as shucking. The basic Elements/Easystore desktop HDD (opens in new tab) retails for $550 while the souped up My Book (opens in new tab) costs $600. Note that these drives tend to use CMR rather than the controversial SMR technology.Įxternal hard disk drives (opens in new tab) of similar capacities sell for a bit more, a far cry from a few years ago when they were selling for much less, which is paradoxical given that they cost more to build. The data center version (HC570) (opens in new tab) ($449), the purple surveillance hard drive (opens in new tab) ($530), the NAS Red version (opens in new tab) ($500) and the enterprise model (opens in new tab) ($499) all have 512MB cache and target the prosumer up to enterprise level looking for the largest internal HDDs. Only Western Digital has successfully seeded 22TB models in the wider retail market. That said, the Seagate Exos X22 is not even listed on Seagate's website and is not on sale anywhere. Toshiba has a 20TB CMR Hard disk drive but no plans for a 22TB one yet. The two biggest hard disk drive vendors have released 22TB hard drives with Western Digital unveiling a 26TB model in 2022 (although you won't be able to buy it as it is a data center only product.