If you're looking for a massive storage volume and aren't concerned about the fastest performance, or if you're willing to take a bit of a risk and "shuck" the drive, this WD Easystore 18TB hard drive deal is for you — Best Buy has the 18TB drive on sale for a mere $199 for Cyber Monday. That's half the normal pricing and works out to a mere penny for each gigabyte of storage. It's even $10 less than the smaller 16TB model, making this a fantastic deal.
This drive is particularly popular for those who "shuck" drives. This process involves popping the case apart to remove the underlying 18TB HDD and then installing it in a PC or NAS, just like a normal drive. This tactic takes advantage of the lower pricing of external HDDs — which are significantly less expensive than drives designed for PCs and NAS — to score a drive to use inside a PC or NAS (there are a multitude of guides online that detail how to accomplish this feat). If you aren't familiar with the practice, you probably shouldn't do it, as it voids your warranty. Regardless, this is a popular use case for this specific model.
For those looking for the traditional use case of employing this drive for backup or archival data, this external 18TB HDD attaches to your system via a USB 3.0 interface with a Micro-USB Type B connector, so you should keep your performance expectations in check — WD doesn't list a performance rating because you'll be limited by the speed of the 5Gb/s USB cable. The enclosure comes with an AC adaptor to power the enclosure.
Again, popping the drive out of its enclosure will void the two-year warranty that comes standard with the device, so proceed at your own risk.
With most external drive enclosures, you can find out which drive the vendor uses, but WD uses white-label drives of varying types for this enclosure, so there's no real telling what lies beneath the sleek black enclosure. These drives are known to come in both 5,400- and 7,200-RPM flavors, which is only important if you shuck the device, but there is a bit of lottery involved to get the faster variant.
For more savings, check out our up-to-the-minute Black Friday tech deals live blog. There, you'll find the latest deal news and buying advice from our editors all day and night.
For even more savings, see our lists of the best Black Friday SSD deals, Black Friday GPU deals, Black Friday CPU deals, Black Friday gaming laptop deals, Black Friday monitor deals, Black Friday 3D printer deals, and Black Friday PC hardware deals overall.
