Seagate One Touch 24TB review: a smart box that fixes every artist's biggest problem

There’s no escaping it; file sizes are getting larger, and finding room for everything from new projects and final artwork to the hundreds of reference images and photos it's too easy to gather, as well as video recordings, is becoming more of a problem. The files just keep getting bigger, whether they’re RAW images, 4K footage, layered Photoshop documents, Procreate canvases, 3D assets, AI experiments, old client work or ideas you absolutely cannot delete because ‘you might need it one day/, and suddenly that laptop SSD that seemed generous when you bought it five years ago feels very small.

That’s where something like the Seagate One Touch 24TB external hard drive comes in (an 8TB model is also available). It isn’t trying to replace a super-fast SSD for your daily creative work, and it doesn’t need to. Now, I’ll be honest, to date I’ve never considered making use of a large external hard drive, but after opening a drawer recently and realising I’d been storing everything on USB sticks, literally dozens, the idea of the Seagate One Touch appeals more than ever. But is it any good, is it worth the money, and can it solve the very ordinary problem of where to put everything?

The easy answer yes, because you get a lot of storage, wrapped up in a simple desktop drive that doesn’t need its own larger power brick, and that last part is probably the thing I like most about the One Touch. Traditional desktop hard drives have always had a bit of a ‘set it and forget it’ feel. They sit on your desk, connected to a power socket, surrounded by cables, doing the important job of protecting your files but making your workspace look like a small server room. The One Touch takes a different approach. It runs through USB-C, so it’s one cable from drive to computer, and that’s it.

A wonderfully compact design

For me, this setup works perfectly because I have a small desk – I use a compact mini PC because of this – and any additional things that add to this workspace need to earn their place and fit neatly into it. The One Touch is a small-ish little black box that can sit behind my drawing tablet stand, and that USB-C power source helps a lot by cutting down desk space. For artists and designers generally, who move between machines, that combination of storage space, speedy data transfers and small desk footprint is a genuinely useful mix.

Whether you're a professional who needs to take a project to a client or want to move a huge archive from your desktop PC to your laptop, the One Touch is a neat solution. Working on location and need somewhere to dump footage or photographs before heading home? This hard drive is ready to go, assuming your USB-C port provides enough power, and you can find space in your bag. It’s small, but that compact size means it does weigh more than you may expect, around 1.22kg – your laptop is probably lighter.

The 24TB capacity of the model reviewed here is the real headline, though, I’ll be honest, it’s overkill for my uses, ridiculous even, but for anyone working in 8K/12K footage, enough for around 600,000 RAW photos, roughly 360 hours of 4K video, or enough Photoshop files, Blender scenes, texture libraries and old client projects that you're far more likely to run out of ideas than disk space. Obviously, your actual numbers will depend on file sizes and workflows, but the point is you’re set for years' worth of project files, and they’ll all be in one easy-to-access place.

For a lot of creatives, that’s the appeal here, because storage anxiety is a real thing. Nobody wants to spend an afternoon deciding which old illustration files can be deleted, or wondering whether a previous version of a project is safely backed up somewhere, or where you left those old storage devices. Having one big archive drive means you can keep the experiments, the rejected ideas and the work-in-progress folders that normally get sacrificed when space starts disappearing.

A perfect creative sidecar

Be aware, though: this is still a traditional hard drive, so it’s not going to compete with an NVMe SSD for speed. If you’re a video editor cutting 8K footage or a 3D artist working on enormous Unreal Engine environments, a fast SSD should still be your working drive, but that’s not really what the One Touch is for. Instead, this is a safe storage archive that complements your workflow, with the SSD still handling the daily creation tasks, but the One Touch is your library, at hand to offer reference folders and recall old work.

Seagate also includes its Toolkit, and at first I shrugged and wondered why I need an external hard drive to have its own software, but it adds some useful backup options and features that make using the One Touch a little more than simply a place to store and forget files. Without making things complicated, you can schedule backups, mirror folders so they stay synced, and manage files without needing another subscription service. There’s also Rescue Data Recovery Services included on eligible drives, which is a nice safety net to have.

There’s a nice creative bonus too, with a two-month subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud Pro included, giving you access to Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro and the rest of Adobe’s creative suite for a while.

The inclusion of Adobe CC and the neat Toolkit software feel like siren features designed to tease me in, because the Seagate One Touch 24TB isn’t cheap. At $779.99 / £669.99, the 24TB model isn't an impulse buy, but when you break it down, it's surprisingly good value. You're getting around $38 per terabyte, which is a fraction of what equivalent SSD storage would cost. If your priority is somewhere safe to keep years of RAW photos, completed video projects or sprawling asset libraries, it's money well spent. If you expect SSD-level performance, though, you're paying for the wrong thing. This drive is all about capacity, convenience and reliability, not outright speed.

The Seagate One Touch 24TB won’t be the most exciting piece of kit you add to a creative setup, but storage rarely is. It’s the kind of purchase you appreciate later, when your hard drive isn’t flashing warnings, your projects are safely backed up, and you’ve still got room for the next big idea. For artists, photographers, designers and anyone whose work generates huge files at an alarming rate, it’s a practical upgrade that solves a very modern creative problem: having too much stuff you actually want to keep.