1. 1TB SSD or 4TB external hard drive? I went shopping for the SSD and came home with the HDD
All I wanted was a 1TB external SSD to plug into my M2 Mac over USB.
Then I checked 2026 prices in Japan. A 1TB external SSD from a brand you have actually heard of cost about ¥16,000–¥20,000 even at the cheap end. The models that feel a bit safer cost more.[1]
Meanwhile, 4TB external hard drives started at about ¥20,500.[2]
That is where the math gets weird:
1TB SSD: about ¥16,799
4TB HDD: about ¥20,498
The gap is about ¥3,700.
Pay ¥3,700 more and you go from 1TB to 4TB. If you do not need the speed, that is hard to argue with.
So the question is simple:
If you just want somewhere to park files you rarely open (articles, photos, old projects, backups), is a 4TB hard drive a smarter buy than a 1TB SSD?
Short answer: yes, as long as you are not carrying it around or editing straight off it. Paying extra for SSD speed can actually be the wrong fit.
2. Line up the prices and HDD capacity looks like a pricing glitch
These are cheap but legit examples I found on Kakaku.com, Japan's big price-comparison site, on September 1, 2026. Brands and product lines differ, so this is not "the same drive in different sizes". It is a snapshot of the lowest real-world prices that day.[3][4][2][1][5][6]
| Type | Capacity | Example price | Price per TB |
|---|---|---|---|
| HDD | 1TB | ¥12,028 | ¥12,028 |
| HDD | 2TB | ¥14,884 | ¥7,442 |
| HDD | 4TB | ¥20,498 | about ¥5,125 |
| SSD | 1TB | ¥16,799 | ¥16,799 |
| SSD | 2TB | ¥27,999 | about ¥14,000 |
| SSD | 4TB | ¥65,980 | ¥16,495 |
Here it is as a rough bar chart. One block is about ¥2,000.
HDD 1TB ¥12,028 ██████
HDD 2TB ¥14,884 ███████
SSD 1TB ¥16,799 ████████
HDD 4TB ¥20,498 ██████████
SSD 2TB ¥27,999 ██████████████
SSD 4TB ¥65,980 █████████████████████████████████
The fun part: a 2TB hard drive costs less than a 1TB SSD.
And the 4TB hard drive is only about ¥3,700 more than the 1TB SSD, for 4 times the space. Compare 4TB with 4TB and it is ¥65,980 for the SSD versus ¥20,498 for the HDD. The SSD costs about 3.2 times as much.[2][6]
If you do not need speed, these are two different price universes.
3. Why is a 2TB hard drive barely more expensive than a 1TB?
An external drive's price is not just about how many terabytes are inside.
The case, the USB board, power, the cable, assembly, the box, shipping and the store's cut: you pay for all of that whether the drive holds 1TB or 4TB.
So halving the capacity does not halve the price.
Right now the cheap 1TB drive was ¥12,028 and the 2TB was ¥14,884. About ¥2,856 more gets you double the space.[3][4]
Going from 2TB to 4TB is only about ¥5,614 more.
The hard drive aisle basically talks like a fast-food counter:
1TB: "That'll be ¥12,000."
2TB: "Add about ¥3,000 and we'll double it."
4TB: "A little over ¥5,000 more and it doubles again."
Unless you are sure you will never need more than 1TB, a 1TB hard drive is usually poor value per terabyte.
4. If you never use the speed, you are paying for speed you never use
SSDs have real strengths: fast reads and writes, no moving parts, and they are great for carrying around.
Japanese storage maker I-O DATA says the same thing: SSDs for editing and creative work where speed matters, HDDs for keeping data.[7]
So the real question is not which one is "better". It is what are you actually waiting on?
SSD speed is worth paying for if you:
- edit video directly on the external drive
- open and save big batches of unedited camera photos all the time
- run virtual machines or games from it
- rebuild big coding projects often
- copy hundreds of gigabytes every day
But if you are just parking:
- Markdown files and article drafts
- old photos and videos
- finished projects
- material you no longer use
- things you can download again
- files you do not want to delete but do not open every day
...you will barely spend any time noticing the speed difference.
Text files are tiny. You do not need 1,000MB/s to open one.
If you do not need a fast warehouse, buy a big one.
5. Hunting for dirt-cheap SSDs turned "cheap" into "homework"
When SSDs feel too pricey, you naturally start looking for something cheaper.
That is when the no-name "SSDs" show up: 1TB, 4TB, 8TB, even 16TB for a few thousand yen. On Amazon Japan I found a 4TB listing whose product name literally said "256G expansion", and another listing selling 1TB for ¥2,000.[8][9]
Reviews on that second one included several reports that the capacity shown did not match what you could actually store.
There is a free tool for checking this called F3. It writes test data across the whole drive, reads it back, and tells you whether the advertised capacity really exists.[10]
Technically, that is cool.
But if you just want more storage, your goal is not to play fake-capacity roulette.
Maybe 1TB for ¥5,000
↓
Test the whole drive when it arrives
↓
Send it back if it's fake
↓
Start shopping again
At that point, are you buying cheap storage, or did you just start an unpaid job as a quality checker?
A price so low that you have to test the drive before you can trust it is not actually cheap.
After that detour, "just buy a normal hard drive from a real brand" suddenly looks great.
6. Why I ended up paying about ¥21,000 for 4TB
¥21,000 is not cheap.
It is exactly the price where your finger hovers over the Buy button.
But next to the 1TB SSD, the picture changes:
- cheapest decent 1TB SSD: about ¥16,799
- cheapest decent 4TB HDD: about ¥20,498
- difference: about ¥3,699
- capacity: 4 times
If you need speed, get the SSD.
If you do not, it is easier to think of it as paying ¥3,700 for an extra 3TB.
When several computers are running out of space and you want to move all the low-priority stuff off them, an extra 1TB fills up surprisingly fast. With 4TB you can move everything you have decided "I'm not using this right now" in one go.
Funny how we happily keep paying for monthly subscriptions, but a ¥21,000 drive triggers a full budget audit. Wallets are strange.
Still, once I counted all the time I would spend clearing space again and again, 4TB was the better fit this time.
7. The cleanest setup: one fast place, one big place
You do not have to move everything to the hard drive.
Keep what you use often on the Mac's internal SSD, and move only the big stuff you rarely touch to the external HDD.
- Internal SSD: current articles, files you use a lot, work in progress
- 4TB HDD: old material, finished projects, big photos and videos, low-priority files
"Things you use often go somewhere fast, things you rarely use go somewhere cheap and big" is the basic way to split storage by job.
That way you only pay for SSD speed where it matters, and you still get the hard drive's low price per terabyte.
No need to go all SSD, and no need to go all HDD.
8. On a Mac, watch two things: the format, and what "backup" really means
If the drive is Mac-only, you can format it as APFS in Disk Utility. If you also want to use it on Windows, exFAT is the option. Apple says APFS works on directly connected external drives too.[11]
You can also use the external HDD for Time Machine. Apple says a backup disk should ideally have at least 2 times the storage of your Mac.[12]
But here is the important part:
If you move files to the HDD and delete them from your computer, that is not a backup. You just moved them.
If that drive dies, your only copy dies with it.
For drafts, photos and documents you really cannot lose, keep one more copy on another drive, in the cloud, or in Time Machine.
For low-priority stuff you could download again or live without, using the 4TB HDD purely as overflow space is perfectly fine.
9. Amazon or Rakuten? Compare the total price of the exact same model
There is no rule that Amazon or Rakuten (Japan's other giant online mall) is always cheaper.
Even for the same model, the day's price, shipping, points, sales and clearance deals can flip the result.
For storage like this, it is easier to check the same model number across stores on a site like Kakaku.com first, then look at what you would actually pay on Amazon or Rakuten.[2]
Rakuten sometimes has days with big points back. Amazon is sometimes just cheaper on the sticker.
Do not make it Amazon versus Rakuten. Pick the model you want and make the stores fight over that day's total price.
10. Bottom line: if you do not need speed, a 4TB HDD is hard to beat
I went looking for a 1TB SSD and ended up with a 4TB HDD.
Once the prices were lined up, that was actually the natural ending.
On September 1, 2026, the examples were ¥16,799 for a 1TB SSD and ¥20,498 for a 4TB HDD. About ¥3,700 more for 4 times the space.[2][1]
SSD speed is absolutely worth something.
But only to people who actually use it.
If you are mostly storing articles, images, finished work and things you might back up:
A big 4TB beats a fast 1TB.
And if you catch yourself staring at no-name bargain SSDs, worrying about fake capacity and reading up on how to test them, just buy a normal 4TB hard drive. Life is calmer that way.
¥21,000 still hurts.
But if it also buys back all those rounds of "OK, what do I delete now?", I can live with it.
Sources
References (13)
- Kakaku.com, Verbatim Mini Stripe 32035-J 1TB external SSD (accessed 2026-09-01) kakaku.com
- Kakaku.com, ELECOM ELD-HTV040UBK 4TB HDD (accessed 2026-09-01) kakaku.com
- Kakaku.com, 1TB external HDD listings (accessed 2026-09-01) kakaku.com
- Kakaku.com, IODATA HDCZ-UT2KC 2TB HDD (accessed 2026-09-01) kakaku.com
- Kakaku.com, DIGIERA DGLPS2000MT02WH 2TB external SSD (accessed 2026-09-01) kakaku.com
- Kakaku.com, Silicon Power Stream S05 SP040TBPSDS05SAKTC 4TB external SSD (accessed 2026-09-01) kakaku.com
- I-O DATA, Differences between HDD, SSD and NAS and how to choose (Japanese) iodata.jp
- Amazon.co.jp, external SSD listing (ASIN B09NRC9Y57, checked 2026-09-01) amazon.co.jp
- Amazon.co.jp, external SSD listing (ASIN B0DQ3RMKKQ, checked 2026-09-01) amazon.co.jp
- F3 official repository github.com
- Apple Support, File system formats available in Disk Utility on Mac (Japanese) support.apple.com
- Apple Support, Back up your Mac with Time Machine (Japanese) support.apple.com
- AKIBA PC Hotline!, SSD price trends (2023-03-23) akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp
