Worth Buying: Seagate Portable 4TB — Plug In and Back Up, Plus a Year of Data Recovery! $269.99 CAD

Amazon.ca currently has the Seagate Portable 4TB external hard drive (STGX4000400) at $269.99 CAD. There's no discount on this one right now. Prime members ship free; otherwise free shipping on orders over $35.

To be upfront: this isn't a markdown, $269.99 is the price. It's here because it's the "you'll need one eventually, and this is the one you can't get wrong" category. Mechanical drive prices have been climbing for two years as data centres soak up capacity, portables first, so waiting probably won't help. This is the long-running #1 in Amazon's external hard drive category with 267,000+ ratings at 4.6 stars — about as close to zero research required as storage gets.

USB 3.0, plug it in, Windows and Mac both pick it up, no driver, drag and drop. 260 g with an 18-inch cable, so it disappears into a laptop bag.

It includes a one-year Rescue Data Recovery plan: if the drive actually fails, Seagate takes one professional shot at the data at no charge. That coverage isn't cheap on its own, and most people only think about it after a drive hits the floor.

Read speed is rated around 120 MB/s, normal for a mechanical drive. Fine for photo and video backups or as a vault drive; not what you want for editing 4K or running games from, which is SSD territory at two to three times the price per capacity.

Where it makes sense: backing up photos and footage, emptying a full laptop, giving your PS4 or Xbox library somewhere to live. On a PS5 an external drive only holds PS4 games, so don't buy it expecting to run PS5 titles off it.

$269.99 for 4TB isn't cheap by the standards of two years ago, but it's in line with where the market sits. Buy it if you need the space now; don't stockpile on a guess about tomorrow's price.

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