This is the cheapest external hard drive per terabyte you can buy this Black Friday, but don’t buy it from Amazon — here’s why

WD Elements 18TB desktop HDD: Was $329.99 Now $229.99 at Western Digital
Save $100 This is an external hard disk drive with a massive capacity from one of the largest HDD vendors in the world. For Black Friday, you get 2-year free data recovery as well worth $10 plus 2-year limited warranty.

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If you want to store hundreds of games for your Sony PlayStation 5 console, then you need a big desktop hard drive and right now, the most affordable large capacity desktop HDD that is compatible with the PS5 is the single-drive WD Elements 18TB which costs $229.99 at Amazon and most other US-based vendors.

That's less than $13 per TB; it has never been so cheap and I don't expect it to be cheaper as it's actually selling for less than previous Black Friday (since 2020). So if you need one, just buy it, don't wait any further or you might regret it.

The WD Elements provides with reliable high capacity storage with USB 3.0 compatibility. The drives come with a two-year warranty and has been formatted to NTFS (you will need to reformat it to exFAT to make it compatible with the PS5). 

The device - known as the WDBWLG0180HBK-NESN - is likely to have a 3.5-inch 5400RPM drive spinning inside which makes it perfect for a backup storage. What is even more incredible is that this external drive is even cheaper than its internal sibling of similar capacity, making it a great option for shucking (removing the drive from a desktop hard drive for use elsewhere).

Western Digital is also providing with a free 2-year data recovery plan worth $10, a freebie that convinced me to list, for this deal, WD as the preferred partner rather than Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart or Newegg.

They partnered with Ontrack, a popular data recovery service, to provide protection for routine and extreme data loss scenarios such as drive failure, viruses, and software issues. For a low, one-time fee, the plan includes one in-lab data recovery attempt, shipping costs to and from Ontrack, and in most cases, a warranty replacement device.

As always though - and especially when backing up terabytes of data, make sure you have a solid backup strategy using a secondary hard disk drive or a cloud storage solution.