Storage deals, buying guides, and hard drive deep dives. I track prices daily so you don't have to, here's what I'm thinking about.
When will hard drive prices go down, and how long will the HDD shortage last? The honest forward look: manufacturers are sold out of 2026 and pre-booked into 2028, analysts see demand outrunning supply through 2028, and there's no near-term trigger for a price crash. Here's why you shouldn't wait for 2027, and the strategic way to buy now instead.
Read more →It's not just hard drives. In 2026 the same AI-datacenter demand that drained HDD supply has jumped the fence to NAND flash and DRAM — SSD and memory prices are climbing hard, and the makers are 'essentially sold out.' Here's what's driving it, and why, for bulk storage, HDDs are still the rational cost-per-TB choice.
Read more →Western Digital and Seagate are 'sold out' of 2026 hard drive capacity and booked into 2028. That headline is real, but it's about datacenter allocation, not the Amazon shelf. You can still buy a drive today. Here's what 'sold out' does and doesn't mean for a normal buyer, and how to find what's genuinely in stock at the best price per TB right now.
Read more →Everyone assumes the biggest drive is the cheapest per terabyte. On Amazon.com it usually is not. I price the cheapest drive you can actually buy at every capacity from 4TB to 20TB, and from 8TB up the price per terabyte clusters in a rough $25/TB band instead of falling smoothly as drives get bigger. Whichever size dips cheapest in a given week (the value knee) is set by one deal and is often an external or shuck candidate, not a bare internal. Here is the method: how the curve really bends, and how to check today's knee yourself before you buy.
Read more →Shucking is the oldest advice on r/DataHoarder: the external is cheaper per TB than the bare drive. I checked all eight capacities on Amazon.com today. Shucking beats a new bare drive at 18TB by 23%, and still loses to a used one by 15%. Here is the full table, the two limits on it, and how to check a sale yourself.
Read more →Every 3.5-inch drive on Amazon.com sits between $25 and $31 per terabyte, so people pick on sticker price. Put four mismatched sizes in a RAID5 array and the real cost per usable terabyte runs from $35 to $52, and it ranks the drives in a different order than the sticker does. Here is the arithmetic, one real thread at a time.
Read more →A buyer asked how he could know a drive was checked at the factory and not by some unknown third party. On Amazon.com today, 629 hard drive listings say Renewed and 7 say recertified. Only 4 say both. Here is what each word promises, what it costs per TB, and the warranty trap in between.
Read more →Two people in the same thread asked whether replacing several old drives with one big one pays for itself in electricity, and nobody did the arithmetic. Here it is: a decade at the US average rate, and twenty-five years if you keep your redundancy.
Read more →Someone posts a listing and asks if it is a good deal. Nobody answering has a benchmark. Here is one: today's cheapest price per TB at every capacity on Amazon.com, eleven real deals scored against it, and the six checks that catch the rest.
Read more →The count matters less than the rate. Here is how to read SMART 5, what a replacement actually costs today, and the four bills that arrive after you save money on a cheap drive.
Read more →SAS is 22% of the hard drives I track at 2TB and up, and 80% of the 25 cheapest per TB, and it needs a host bus adapter. And the ones luring you in are exactly the capacities where SAS saves you nothing. Here is where it actually pays, with the break-even math.
Read more →Surveillance drives cost 23% to 55% more per TB than the alternatives on new stock, for a feature set that only a hardware DVR switches on. But on the used shelf the ranking inverts, and a used 12 TB Purple Pro now undercuts every NAS drive on the board.
Read more →I removed 19 bad listings from my own price comparison site, including a motorcycle footpeg clamp ranked as the cheapest hard drive on the page. Here is what actually goes wrong in drive listings, and the five-second check that catches most of it.
Read more →Nobody can tell you when the price spike ends, including me. But buying well today saves 9% to 33% depending on capacity, which is more than most people are waiting for. Today's real $/TB, the arithmetic on buying smaller, and what to do in four common situations.
Read more →The median 8 TB drive costs 134% more per terabyte than the median 28 TB drive. But the cheapest listing is nearly flat from 8 TB to 28 TB, which looks like it lets careful buyers ignore capacity. It doesn't, and the reason is how deep the floor goes.
Read more →Used and recertified drives cost 62-75% of new on Amazon.com right now. But the surprise is the warranty column: used drives with a 2-year-plus warranty are 18% cheaper per TB than used drives with none. Live data, the math, and the checklist.
Read more →You have a listing open and you already did the math. Here is what $/TB actually looks like on Amazon right now. Median new and used prices by capacity tier, with good/fair/overpriced bands so you can tell in five seconds.
Read more →May 2026 hard drive deals ranked by price per TB. I track prices daily on Amazon.com: here's where the real value is this month and what to avoid.
Read more →External desktop drives sit around $35/TB and portables around $57/TB on Amazon.com, measured 11 August 2026. What to buy at each budget, and why shucking has stopped paying at most capacities.
Read more →The best budget SSDs for gaming in 2026, ranked by real-world load times, price per TB, and value. No marketing fluff: just what works for your money.
Read more →Picking the right hard drive for your home server in 2026, ranked by price per TB. Exactly what to buy for TrueNAS, Unraid, Proxmox, and general home server builds.
Read more →Enterprise vs consumer hard drives explained: reliability, warranty, workload ratings, and whether paying more for enterprise actually makes sense for your use case.
Read more →A head-to-head comparison of WD Red Plus and Seagate IronWolf NAS drives in 2026, on price per TB, workload rating, noise, and warranty. Here is the honest verdict.
Read more →The best drives for a Plex media server in 2026, ranked by price per TB, noise, and reliability. Here is what works and what to avoid.
Read more →I track drive prices daily. Here's what's actually the cheapest per TB across HDDs, SSDs, and NVMe: with the math on why price per TB is the only metric that matters.
Read more →Should you put SSDs in your NAS? I compared price per TB, performance, and total cost for HDD vs SSD NAS builds. Here's when each makes sense.
Read more →Hard drive prices have jumped 100-200% since 2024. Western Digital and Seagate are now sold out of 2026 HDD capacity and booked into 2028, a NAND shortage is pushing buyers onto disk, and prices are up ~50% year over year. Here's what's driving it, and how to still find the best price per TB right now.
Read more →The best NAS hard drives in 2026, ranked by price per TB, reliability, and workload rating. Here is exactly what the numbers say to buy today.
Read more →I track hard drive prices daily. Here's what's actually the cheapest storage per TB on Amazon.com: no clickbait, just math. Updated for the 2026 shortage — prices have risen sharply since April.
Read more →A real comparison of SSD vs HDD cost per terabyte in 2026. I track prices daily and the gap is shrinking: here's when each makes sense for your money.
Read more →This week's best hard drive deals ranked by price per TB. I'm tracking prices daily so you don't have to: here's what's worth buying right now.
Read more →I track hard drive and SSD prices daily. Here's exactly what 1TB of storage costs in 2026 across HDDs, SSDs, and NVMe: and how to get the best deal.
Read more →SMR drives in a NAS or RAID array are a rebuild risk, not just a slow one. Which WD Red and Seagate models shipped SMR, how to check a model number before you buy, and when SMR is genuinely the right call.
Read more →Stop comparing drives by sticker price. Price per terabyte is the single best way to find storage value, and here is why I built an entire site around it.
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