Do you think a 16 terabyte external drive is a bit of an overkill?

My external drive has passed away recently, and I've been thinking of getting new one to start my back up files again. There's a 16 TB drive available at my local shop, but it is extremely expensive. On the other hand, when it comes to storage sizes, you can never have too much, right? So what do you guys think? Is 16 TB an overkill, and should I just buy something much smaller in size, or do you think the price is worth it for that kind of storage space?

 

What is the price? It should't be hard to comparison shop online and find out if the place is over charging. The range of prices for 10 to 16 terabyte external drives is huge. If the price was low enough I would buy it, but that is just me.

 

Ehh, it depends on what you'll be using it for. A little bit of cost-benefit analysis is needed here.

Like you said, you can never have too much storage, but at the same time greater and greater capacities are able to be made cheaper and cheaper. I would assume that it's several hundred, if not into the thousands of dollars for this 16 TB external drive?

A cheap 1 or 2 TB external drive can be found at any tech shop or even Walmart for around $100-150. Unless you need to start a massive cache of 4K movies now, I would hold off on such a large capacity until it becomes more affordable. That being said though, I can't speak for your storage needs and only you know how much you truly need.

 

This is our rule of the house when purchasing storage, particularly hard disk drive. We have to computer for the needed storage like the amount of pictures and videos it would contain. Let's say the computation is 1TB so that means we can settle for 2TB or 3TB (but I guess there's no 3TB). That 16TB may become obsolete before you can utilize the entire storage. Especially if that is an HDD, maybe 2 years from now the SSD is the standard.

 

16 TB... I would go and check just how many dollars you're paying per gig, as I feel that the price definitely goes up once you head over to 16 TB.

I also don't think you need something quite that big, 10 TB would be the highest I would go, as I honestly don't think I would be able to fill that thing up before it eventually wears out. It also depends on just how much media you yourself have, as often times going for the largest and most expensive isn't always the best product.

External HDDs also go on sale really often, take a look at slickdeals, maybe set an alert, and newegg etc. I would wait until something like a 5 TB goes on sale, and then purchase it.

 

16 TB is huge and I am sure it is not cheap either! I bought 1 TB Seagate on Amazon for around $60 dollars, but if you want to go bigger than that the price jumps at least triple! I only use my portable hard drive to store photos and other datas just in case. I don't have movies or musics on this storage.

 

It depends.
If you truly have that many huge files to store, then it is not overkill at all.

However, if I were you, I'd rather get several smaller hard drives instead of just one. Imagine what if that 16TB hard drive suddenly die on you? You will lose all your files since it is the only device for storage.

I keep two copies of all my important files. So I need minimal two external hard drives. Yes, I have experienced external HDD died on me and lost the only copy of files. So now I play safe. I can't lose both hard drives at the same time, can I? Well unless something really bad luck happens lol...

My advice is, it is a better idea to organize your files into categories, and divide them cross different hard drives, and keep at least two copies on separated devices.

 

I don't think that 16 TB is obsolete or Overkill if you need it. One thing I can say is that it is a waste of money. In case the Drive fails you are likely to lose all of your important Data with it. It is always important to maintain redundancy while upgrading to high Storage. In the case of a Drive failure, you can replace that Drive and you won't loose any money or Data. It is wiser and more future proof to choose lower capacity Dives and using them in RAID instead of buying one 16TB hard Drive. Good Luck.

 

Personally, I think, you would not need a 16tb hard disk, unless you keep on downloading movies and tv series. Then too 16tb is a huge overkill.

In order to use it properly with your laptop, you would need a good processor and high amount of RAM and if you are not having any of these it would be difficult to fetch or write the data into it and this is another issue which you would face if you are getting that hard disk.

 

That is a good suggestion if you are worried that you might loose your info, it's better to buy two smaller drives and have the one back the information of the other. Two smaller drives will still be cheaper then one 16TB drive, depending on the size that you choose.

 

Not really, I know people that are professional video makers (they also do bits in movies and shows) and they would totally fill up 16 TB of storage. Considering a lot of high quality movies and shows nowadays are also shot in 4K you can fill up that much memory pretty fast. a 16 TB HDD also gives you the ability to store more clips in case you decide to change up something.

 

It really depends what you're going to use it for. In my opinion 5tb is more than enough. If you're storing massive projects and videos, go ahead with the 16tb! I actually feel 16tb is something like 32gb RAM way too much but still better than having less.

 

That would depend on how much space do you actually need plus some allowances. If it's for back up, I would actually prefer getting two smaller ones so I'll have two back ups. I will never be satisfied with just one back up. And by the way, whether it's 16 TB or 4 TB, when it goes, it goes, along with all the files stored on the disk.

 

Unless you have hundreds of movies and thousands of songs and photos to store, you don';t need 16 TB storage. I have over 100 movies, more than 500 songs and over two thousand photos and my 1 TB disk still as 20 percent storage available.