About HDDHunt

Why I built this

I was eleven when a friend gave me a "broken" 486 DX2 66. Every wire inside it had been pulled out and left in a box, like a box of spaghetti. There was no manual, and no internet to ask, so I just started plugging things in.

Night after night, trying the wires in different positions. It felt like there were a thousand combinations. There are actually only eight ways an IDE cable can go between a motherboard and a hard drive, but I did not know the two ends were independent of each other, so I worked through it blind. Then there was the floppy drive, and plenty of other wires to confuse things further.

That was the start of my computer journey. After it, I collected whatever hardware I could get my hands on. Back then the internet either did not exist yet or it was AltaVista, and you could not really find much, but I was fascinated anyway.

There was an Atari 2600 in there too. Adventure was the favourite, and one of the only games I owned that was actually any good. Most of the rest were junk. Later it was SimCity on the SNES, which I could lose an entire weekend to.

How I ended up caring about drives

For years I ran Windows Home Server, and I still think it was quietly brilliant. The tombstone approach to storage was genius, and the whole thing was genuinely easy to live with. I was probably one of a handful of people actually running it. Then it packed up, and it became obvious that everything had moved to Linux, or had moved years earlier and I was just late noticing.

What followed was far, far too much reading. CMR versus SMR, ZFS, ext, SnapRAID, btrfs. In the end I paid the hundred dollars for Unraid, for one reason above all the others: I wanted to add a drive whenever I could afford one, instead of planning a whole array up front. btrfs has the not-really-RAID problem when a disk dies, and I am too tight to keep buying new drives, so I buy cheap and I expect them to fail. SnapRAID is still on my list to try, probably by risking some of the media I could stand to lose.

Today that means a hodgepodge of WD Reds and some SMR drives I probably should not be running. They were cheap, and storage is not. Unraid handles the mix without complaining, even in summer when I am buried in temperature warnings at 118°F (48°C).

That is the whole reason this site exists. Buying cheap and expecting failure means the price per terabyte is the number that decides everything, and I got tired of working it out by hand every time. So I built HDDHunt to do it for me.

What HDDHunt Does

HDDHunt tracks every HDD and SSD listing on amazon.com, calculates the price per terabyte, and sorts everything so the best value floats to the top. Prices update daily. No accounts, no paywalls, no ads.

Whether you're building a NAS, expanding a Plex server, upgrading your PS5, or buying enterprise Exos drives for a homelab, HDDHunt shows you where to get the most storage for your money.

Affiliate Disclosure

HDDHunt uses Amazon affiliate links. When you buy a drive through a link on this site, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. That's how the site stays free. You can read the full affiliate disclosure here.

Get in Touch

Got a feature request, found a bug, or just want to talk storage? Email me at hi@hddhunt.com. I read everything.