The AI industry has been gobbling down computer components at such a rate that the world’s supply can’t keep up. Manufacturers make a finite amount, and so demand has outstripped supply and driven up the prices to eye-watering levels. Now you wish you hadn’t slept through that portion of history class when they covered the free market, don’t you?

Storage has also felt the sting of massive price increases lately. Prices for popular models of solid state drives (SSDs), I’ve noticed, have more than doubled within the last year. As Adam Smith, father of economics, would say, “Shit’s expensive.” But Best Buy has dropped a hell of a deal in our laps on the SanDisk Creator Pro external SSD. Normally $340 (these days, at least), it’s down to $231.

back up your damn files

You should be backing up your files often by copying them to a secondary location. There’s a reason why I titled my explainer about this, “If You Don’t Back Up Your Files, You’re Living an Inch From Disaster.” Hell, you should be backing up your files to two locations regularly.

There’s an old saying I inheriteded from my father, who in turn inherited from the software industry he worked in from the late 1970s to the 2010s: If it doesn’t exist in three places, it doesn’t exist. That means that because files get corrupted and misplaced, their temporal nature means that having just one copy of a file means that there’s a somewhat slim but real chance that it could vanish forever.

With backups to an external drive, such as the SanDisk we’re spotlighting here, you ensure that your precious files and photos live on if the originals on your computer get corrupted, or if you lose your laptop or spill soda on it.

SanDisk is a major name in SSDs, right alongside Samsung as one of the preeminent brands. I can’t imagine why Best Buy slashed the price by 32 percent when people are buying up all the SSDs they can at inflated retail prices. But it doesn’t take understanding the “why” in order to hit “buy.”