HDD|Hunt

Buy Now or Wait? Hard Drive Prices in August 2026, and a Decision Rule That Doesn't Need a Forecast

By HDDHunt ·
price per tb hdd hdd prices buying guide deals

“$150 for a USED 8TB SATA HDD, $149 for a WD external portable 2TB HDD. That’s double what it was a year ago, and even 50% more than one month ago. WTF is going on… Trying to expand my NAS outside of an external drive but cant afford shit anymore.”

That is the mood, and it is entirely earned. The site already has a piece on why prices are rising. This one is about the question people ask immediately afterwards, which is not “why” but “so what do I do”: buy at the peak, buy smaller, buy used, or sit it out.

Almost everyone asking is not price-curious. They have a half-finished build or a full array and they cannot postpone forever.

What I can tell you and what I can’t

Let me be straight about this before any numbers, because it changes what the rest of the article is for.

I cannot tell you when this ends. Nobody can. This is a supply squeeze, and I have no more insight into flash and platter capacity allocation than anyone in those threads. Any article that gives you a date is guessing at you.

I also cannot show you my own price history. I track live prices and recompute price per TB daily, but the history feature on this site has never actually recorded anything. I found that out this week. So I am not going to draw you a rising line and call it my data, because I do not have the series behind it. Where this article talks about the past, it is quoting people who were there, and it says so.

What I can do is measure today precisely, which turns out to be enough, because the useful decision does not need a forecast. That is the whole argument below.

What drives actually cost today

Internal 3.5” SATA hard drives on Amazon.com, measured 6 August 2026. 1,429 listings at 2 TB and above, 1,064 of them repriced today. Median is the middle listing. The 25th percentile is cheaper than three quarters of the shelf, which is roughly what you pay if you actually read the page.

CapacityNew 25th pctNew medianUsed 25th pctUsed median
3 to 4 TB$49.75$62.25$34.31$41.25
6 to 8 TB$53.50$79.08$31.67$36.50
10 to 12 TB$47.08$66.66$29.00$30.83
14 to 16 TB$46.53$59.80$26.07$30.62
18 to 20 TB$39.79$48.39$28.55$30.53
22 to 28 TB$38.23$42.65$26.89$28.36

For the trend, the only honest evidence I have is what people who bought earlier remember. These are recollections, not measurements, and I have kept them separate from my own numbers on purpose:

PointSource$/TB
New 14 TB at ~$200, in 2022u/knightcrusader, recalled~$14.29
Used 22 TB at $220, before the spikeu/Slowdive91, recalled~$10.00
Used 22 TB at $550, nowu/Slowdive91, current~$25.00
Cheapest new 8 TB+, todaymeasured, 2026-08-06$24.99
Median new 8 TB+, todaymeasured, 2026-08-06$62.10

“My supplier for used drives has gone from $220 to $550 for 22tb. RMA isn’t even an option in some cases. Good luck!”

Do not blend those rows into one line on a chart. Two of them are memories.

The cheap end of every price site is a mirage right now

Before the advice, a warning about the tool you are probably using to check prices, including mine.

The cheapest listing in my entire catalogue today is $13.33/TB. It is a 3 TB HP enterprise part from roughly 2011. The one below it, at $8.33/TB, is the same drive listed as new. Almost every row under about $21/TB is small, ancient, or a parsing error, and I have one listing at $19.63/TB that is a motorcycle footpeg clamp whose part number contains “6005”, which my parser read as 6,005 GB.

This matters more during a spike than at any other time, because a spike is exactly when people go hunting for the impossible number and are primed to believe it. So when someone asks:

“We aren’t. The deals are gone. Sometimes someone on homelabsales has something reasonable, but otherwise nothing is available.”

They are essentially right about the retail catalogue, and the numbers that appear to contradict them are artifacts. The honest counterpoint in that same thread is about a different market:

“I want to say that’s not accurate. Look at eBay sold listings for Seagate Exos drives (e.g. 26TB), and you’ll find a few sales for a reasonable $15/TB. Same with Craigslist, if you monitor it and negotiate, you’ll find a good deal every once in a while. It’s getting hard for sure, but there…”

  • u/-Sliced-, same thread

I cannot verify that, because I only track Amazon.com. It sounds plausible and it is a real strategy, but it is a strategy that costs you time and vigilance rather than money. Judge it on that.

Use tier medians and percentiles to price a listing you have already read. Never use the minimum. A median is robust to one motorcycle footpeg. A minimum is defined by it.

The tactic everyone lands on, and why it is wrong

Read enough of these threads and you find the same plan again and again: do not dump money in at the peak, buy something small now, upgrade later when prices come back.

“My raid that is currently filled costs me $400 for 16 TB (4x4TB, lasted 3.5 years). Now it would cost me about $1400 to do 32TB with a new enclosure… I could make the investment now, knowing these prices would likely decrease eventually, or just get 4x 4 TB hard drives, spend less, and not dump the investment at the peak of inflated prices.”

That is a completely reasonable-sounding plan and nobody in the thread priced it. Here it is priced, at today’s 25th percentile:

BuildCapacityDrivesCost todayBays
8 x 4 TB32 TB8$1,3608
4 x 8 TB32 TB4$1,3994
2 x 16 TB32 TB2$1,2622
2 x 18 TB36 TB2$1,0352

The cheap-looking route costs $325 more and gives you 4 TB less.

Not more per terabyte. More money, in total, for less storage, using four times the bays. The “spend less now” plan does not spend less. It spends more, and it spends the bays as well, which is the resource you will actually wish you had back.

This holds across the whole table. New 3 to 4 TB drives are 46% more expensive per terabyte than new 22 to 28 TB drives ($62.25 against $42.65). Small drives are not the frugal option during a spike. They are the option that feels frugal because each individual purchase is small.

If you want the full version of this argument, fewer big drives or more small ones works through the whole capacity curve, including why the apparent bargains at small capacities cannot actually be bought in quantity.

The decision rule that doesn’t need a forecast

Here is the thing that made me want to write this piece.

Everyone is trying to answer a question they cannot answer: which way is the market going. Meanwhile there is a large, certain saving sitting in front of them that requires no prediction at all.

Buying at the 25th percentile instead of the median, today:

CapacityMedian $/TB25th pct $/TBYou save
3 to 4 TB$51.25$39.9922%
6 to 8 TB$59.34$40.0033%
10 to 12 TB$48.60$34.8728%
14 to 16 TB$47.06$35.7124%
18 to 20 TB$36.50$30.5116%
22 to 28 TB$31.21$28.299%

Now put that next to waiting. On a 36 TB build in 18 TB drives:

RouteCost
Buy the median listing today$1,200
Buy at the 25th percentile today$1,035, saving $165
Wait, and the market falls 10%$1,080, saving $120
Wait, and the market falls 15%$1,020, saving $180

Shopping properly today beats a 10% market drop, and it beats it with certainty, immediately, with no waiting. A 15% drop edges it, and you would have to be right about both the direction and the timing to collect.

So the rule is:

Do not try to time the market. Time is the one thing you cannot price. Spend that effort on the spread instead, because the spread is 9% to 33% and it is available right now.

The corollary is the honest half: if you do not actually need the storage, waiting costs you nothing, so wait. This rule is for people who need capacity. Nobody should buy drives to beat a price rise.

And on Black Friday specifically, which comes up in every one of these threads: I have no evidence either way. This is a supply-driven rise and holiday discounting works on demand. Nobody in the threads I read presented evidence that holidays discount hard drives during a supply squeeze. That is not a prediction that they won’t, it is an admission that I do not know.

Four situations, four answers

Your array is full now. Buy, and buy at the top of what you can stomach: 18 TB and up, where the used market sits at $28 to $31/TB and the shelf is deep. A used 18 TB with a 60-month warranty is $449.99 today, which is $25.00/TB. Waiting while full is not a strategy, it is just a slower version of buying later at an unknown price.

You are building fresh. Buy the biggest parity drive you can afford first, then fill in around it over time. That sequencing costs nothing extra and it stops you painting yourself into a capacity you cannot exceed later. Buying incrementally is genuinely sensible right now, so long as each increment is a big drive rather than a small one.

You are topping up an existing array. Match or exceed your current largest drive, and check the warranty column before the price column. At 18 TB the gap between used and new is unusually narrow: a brand new Seagate Exos X18 with a 5-year warranty is $499.00, which is $27.72/TB, only 11% above the cheapest used 18 TB. That is the smallest new-drive premium anywhere on my table and it is worth knowing before you default to refurbished.

Your backup drives are full and you are staring at the bill. This one came up verbatim:

“Buying 2 new drives is way too expensive now. What are my options?… What are you guys doing? LTO tape? Online?”

I have not priced tape or cloud, so I am not going to pretend to compare them. What I can say about the drive side is that backup is the one job where a used drive with a warranty makes the most obvious sense, because the data exists somewhere else by definition. If any part of your storage should absorb the risk, it is this part.

There is also a tactic in the threads worth repeating, from someone thinking clearly:

“Or would it be possible to use dual parity for now, and then when I get close to 90% full drop one of the parity drives down as a data drive? Hopefully by that time prices will drop to normal and I can just buy some extra drives.”

That is a real option and it is priced in redundancy rather than dollars. It buys you one drive’s worth of capacity at the cost of your second parity. Reasonable for media you could re-acquire, and a bad trade for anything you cannot.

The streaming comparison, actually calculated

This is the emotional core of the whole topic and I have never seen anyone finish the sum:

“I want out of all my subscription services. But buying enough drive space that would give me a decent library and then enough for redundancy alone would take me about 2.5 years of monthly streaming services to see a return on investment. And that’s before the machine it’s running on. I hate streaming services SO MUCH but storage is KILLING ME.”

They are not in the US so their prices are not mine to quote, but the arithmetic transfers. On Amazon.com today, 36 TB in two 18 TB drives at the 25th percentile is $1,035 for the drives:

Your monthly streaming spendBreak-even
$3035 months, about 2.9 years
$5021 months, about 1.7 years
$7514 months, about 1.2 years

Their 2.5 year estimate is about right for a moderate subscription stack, and it gets a lot better the more services you are paying for. Substitute your own number, that is the point of the table. Add the machine, and note that the drives keep working after payback while the subscriptions do not. The storage calculator will size the library part if you want to be more precise than “36 TB”.

One genuinely strange thing about this market

This surprised me enough that I want to flag it rather than smooth it over:

“some may look down at used drives but I’ve seen multiple reports of people having even Seagate do flips not to honor warranties on new drives. It’s a crazy market out here. I actually feel like I’d trust a used marketplace seller’s warranty (gohard drive etc) more than manufacturer”

“I know service providers that can’t even get replacements, so it’s a big issue right now.”

  • u/Slowdive91, same thread

I have not verified any individual warranty claim and I am not going to repeat an accusation as fact. But it lines up with something I measured independently last week: used drives carrying a 60-month warranty are cheaper per terabyte than used drives with none, by about 18% in the 6 to 16 TB range. The recert sellers are competing hard on warranty terms, which is what you would expect if warranty confidence had become the scarce thing rather than the drives.

Two different routes to the same conclusion: during this spike, read the warranty column before the price column.

What this doesn’t cover

Amazon.com only, in dollars, for the US market. Two of the sharpest quotes above are from people outside it, and I have used them for the feeling rather than the figures on purpose. Australian and European prices are their own problem and converting mine would be worse than useless.

I also cannot see stock depth, and I have no visibility into eBay, ServerPartDeals, GoHardDrive or the liquidators, all of which people in these threads use constantly.

And once more, because it is the load-bearing limitation: I have no price history of my own. Everything above is a measurement of today plus other people’s recollections, clearly separated.

My own position

I run Unraid, and I am the person this article is written for. Too tight to buy new drives, so I plan for failure instead of paying to avoid it, and the array is a hodgepodge of WD Reds plus some cheap SMR drives that by my own advice should not be in there. They went in because they were cheap and storage is not.

What I would do right now, having pulled these numbers, is exactly the rule above: stop reading the news, spend an hour reading listings instead. The 33% sitting in the spread at 6 to 8 TB is larger than anything the market is likely to hand me for waiting, and I do not have to be right about anything to collect it.

Bottom line

As of 6 August 2026, on Amazon.com:

  • Nobody can tell you when this ends, including me. Treat any article that gives you a date as entertainment.
  • Buying well beats waiting. The 25th percentile is 9% to 33% below the median depending on capacity, available now, no forecast required.
  • Buying smaller to spend less does not spend less. 36 TB in two 18 TB drives is $1,035. 32 TB in eight 4 TB drives is $1,360.
  • The cheap end of every price site is a mirage. My own cheapest listing is a 3 TB drive from 2011. Use medians, never minimums.
  • Read the warranty column first. It is the cheaper half of the used market and the thing the community has stopped trusting from manufacturers.
  • If you do not need the storage, wait. This is advice for people with a full array, not for people trying to beat a price rise.

For live prices, cheapest HDD per TB ranks everything I track and best HDD deals surfaces the movers. To price a listing you already have open, the good price per TB benchmark has percentile bands by tier. For the background on the spike itself, why HDD prices are rising covers the supply side.

Prices in this article were measured from live Amazon.com listings on 6 August 2026 and cover 1,429 internal 3.5” SATA hard drives at 2 TB and above. Historical figures are attributed community recollections, labelled as such, and are not measurements. Streaming break-even figures use a stated monthly spend you should replace with your own. Reddit quotes are from public threads, linked at each quote. HDDHunt earns a commission on purchases made through links on this site, at no extra cost to you. See the affiliate disclosure.