Is This a Good Price per TB? The Benchmark Table to Check It Against (August 2026)
Someone on r/DataHoarder posted a listing last week: a factory recertified drive, 694 €, working out to 24,79 € per TB. They had already done the division. They knew the number. They still had no idea whether it was a good one.
“24,79€ per TB is the best I’ve seen this year. […] To me it looks like too good to be true so I would skip this.”
The thread agreed with them. “Yea, we got to the point where 700 euro for a used drive with unknown warranty is too good to be true.”
Here is the thing: that price was normal. Not a steal, not a scam. It was market rate. I’ll show the math further down, but the short version is that 694 € ÷ 24,79 €/TB is a 28 TB drive, and 28 TB recertified drives on Amazon.com right now have a median price of $26.75/TB. The crowd talked someone out of an ordinary deal because nobody in the thread had a current number to check it against.
That is the whole problem. Everyone in these threads calculates $/TB correctly and then guesses at whether the result is good. The answers they get back are “I paid X last year” or “reseller Y has it for Z”, anecdotes and moving targets. In one thread I read, two people disagreed by $110 on the current price of the same drive.
So here is the missing piece: a dated, absolute benchmark. I track every drive listing on Amazon.com and recompute price per TB continuously, and this is what the whole market looks like as of 2 August 2026.
The number to check against
Internal 3.5” SATA hard drives on Amazon.com. Median price per TB by capacity tier, split new versus used/recertified. n is how many live listings sit in each cell.
| Capacity | New, median $/TB | n | Used, median $/TB | n | Used vs new |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3–4 TB | $61.60 | 149 | $41.25 | 141 | −33% |
| 6–8 TB | $61.83 | 172 | $36.55 | 107 | −41% |
| 10–12 TB | $48.04 | 106 | $30.00 | 94 | −38% |
| 14–16 TB | $48.17 | 65 | $30.31 | 54 | −37% |
| 18 TB | $41.36 | 11 | $30.00 | 23 | −27% |
| 20 TB | $42.76 | 12 | $31.00 | 8 | −28% |
| 22 TB | $40.89 | 6 | $30.00 | 5 | −27% |
| 24 TB | $39.54 | 9 | $28.29 | 11 | −28% |
| 26–28 TB | $40.35 | 6 | $26.75 | 12 | −34% |
Three things fall straight out of this table, and all three contradict what the threads usually say.
1. Small drives are the rip-off, not the bargain. A new 3–4 TB drive costs 56% more per terabyte than a new 24 TB drive. The instinct to “start small and add drives later” is the single most expensive habit in home storage.
2. Used and recertified drives run 27–41% below new across every tier. The discount is deepest in the mid capacities and at the very top: at 26–28 TB the used market is 34% below new.
3. The curve flattens around 18 TB. From 3 TB to 18 TB, new $/TB falls by a third. From 18 TB to 28 TB it barely moves. There is a sweet spot, and it is wide.
A caution on the thin rows: the 18 TB through 28 TB tiers have single-digit or low-double-digit listing counts. Those medians are real but they move faster than the fat tiers, because two listings changing price shifts the middle. Treat 3–16 TB as solid ground and the high-capacity rows as directionally right.
Good / fair / overpriced, by tier
Medians tell you the middle. What you actually want to know, holding a listing, is which band you are in. These are the 25th and 75th percentiles of live listings in each tier, so “great” means cheaper than three quarters of the market, and “overpriced” means more expensive than three quarters of it.
New drives
| Capacity | Great deal (≤) | Fair range | Overpriced (>) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3–4 TB | $48/TB | $48 – $80 | $80/TB |
| 6–8 TB | $49/TB | $49 – $94 | $94/TB |
| 10–12 TB | $42/TB | $42 – $63 | $63/TB |
| 14–16 TB | $42/TB | $42 – $63 | $63/TB |
| 18 TB | $38/TB | $38 – $47 | $47/TB |
| 20 TB | $39/TB | $39 – $55 | $55/TB |
| 22 TB | $33/TB | $33 – $50 | $50/TB |
| 24 TB | $36/TB | $36 – $44 | $44/TB |
| 26–28 TB | $39/TB | $39 – $42 | $42/TB |
Used, refurbished and factory recertified
| Capacity | Great deal (≤) | Fair range | Overpriced (>) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3–4 TB | $35/TB | $35 – $50 | $50/TB |
| 6–8 TB | $32/TB | $32 – $46 | $46/TB |
| 10–12 TB | $29/TB | $29 – $36 | $36/TB |
| 14–16 TB | $26/TB | $26 – $33 | $33/TB |
| 18 TB | $28/TB | $28 – $33 | $33/TB |
| 20 TB | $30/TB | $30 – $32 | $32/TB |
| 22 TB | $30/TB | n/a | $30/TB |
| 24 TB | $28/TB | $28 – $30 | $30/TB |
| 26–28 TB | $26/TB | $26 – $27 | $27/TB |
The used 22 TB row has no meaningful range because every listing in that tier is priced at essentially the same number. That is a small-sample artifact, not a law of nature.
Notice how tight the used bands get above 18 TB. A few dollars per TB separates a great deal from a bad one. At those capacities the difference between $28/TB and $32/TB on a 24 TB drive is about $96. Worth five seconds of checking.
Back to the German drive
694 € ÷ 24,79 €/TB = 28 TB. So: a 28 TB factory recertified drive.
The US used 26–28 TB median is $26.75/TB, with a great-deal threshold of $26/TB.
Two honest caveats before anyone quotes this at me. Euros are not dollars, and I am not going to pretend a currency conversion I haven’t priced. And German retail prices include 19% VAT while US listings exclude sales tax, so the ex-VAT equivalent of 24,79 €/TB is about 20,83 €/TB, which makes the German offer look better still, not worse.
Even taking the euro figure at face value as if it were dollars (the least generous possible reading), 24.79 lands inside the normal US band for that capacity. It is not below it. It is not an outlier. It is a Tuesday.
The commenter’s instinct wasn’t stupid. It was calibrated to a market that no longer exists. Prices rose hard through 2026 (I wrote about why HDD prices are rising), and everyone’s internal “that’s too cheap” alarm is still set to 2024 numbers. When your reference point is stale, every current price looks wrong. The expensive ones look outrageous and the fair ones look fake.
The same thread had someone else say it perfectly, about a drive they’d already bought:
“I got swept up by what looked like a good Price per Terabyte in this current market.”
Both failure modes, one market. The fix for both is the same: check against a dated number, not a memory.
The five-second check
Here is the whole method.
Step 1. Divide. Total price ÷ capacity in TB. Use the advertised TB, not the formatted capacity your OS reports; every listing on the market is priced on the decimal number, so comparing on it is consistent even though you’ll see less usable space. A 24 TB drive at $659.99 is $27.50/TB.
Step 2. Find your row above. New or used, then capacity tier. That single number tells you whether you are being fleeced, in less time than it takes to open a second tab.
Step 3. Only then, check the things price doesn’t capture. A great $/TB on the wrong drive is still the wrong drive.
- Warranty months. This is the biggest hidden variable in the used market, and it is not priced into $/TB at all. Right now on Amazon.com you can find 18 TB recertified drives at $25.00/TB with a 60-month warranty and 22 TB drives at $29.95/TB with none stated. Same market, wildly different risk. Sort by warranty before you sort by price.
- CMR vs SMR. SMR drives are slower on random writes and painful during RAID rebuilds. If the listing doesn’t say, assume the worst on consumer desktop models. (Full breakdown here.)
- SATA vs SAS. SAS drives are often dramatically cheaper per TB, because most people can’t plug them in. If you don’t already own an HBA, that bargain isn’t one. Everything in the tables above is SATA specifically, to keep the comparison honest.
- Condition wording. “Factory recertified” (the manufacturer tested and rewarranted it) is a genuinely different product from “used, good” (someone pulled it from a server). Both are legitimate. They should not cost the same.
- Power-on hours. Check SMART the day it arrives. A recert drive with 45,000 hours on it is not the same asset as one with 8,000, whatever the listing says.
- Burn-in. Preclear or badblocks it before you trust it with anything. Infant mortality is real, and the return window is short.
Step 4. Buy at the tier, not the drive. If your target capacity sits in a tier with bad economics, move tiers. That’s the next section.
Why 4 TB is a trap
Take $700 and spend it three ways at today’s medians:
| What you buy | $/TB | What $700 gets you |
|---|---|---|
| New 3–4 TB drives | $61.60 | 11.4 TB |
| New 24 TB drive | $39.54 | 17.7 TB |
| Used 24 TB drive | $28.29 | 24.7 TB |
Same money. More than twice the storage.
This isn’t theoretical. A 24 TB recertified NAS drive with a 60-month warranty is $649.99 today at $27.08/TB, comfortably in the “great deal” band. Buying that same 24 TB as 4 TB drives at the tier median would cost roughly $1,478.
And the sticker price is only part of it. Someone in one of these threads pointed at a bulk listing of small drives and said the quiet part out loud:
“30 drives for 120tb sounds like a power and enclosure headache.”
They’re right, and it’s worth quantifying. To reach 120 TB:
| 30 × 4 TB | 5 × 24 TB | |
|---|---|---|
| Drives | 30 | 5 |
| Bays needed | 30 | 5 |
| Upfront at tier median (new) | ~$7,392 | ~$4,745 |
| Idle draw @ ~5 W/drive | 150 W | 25 W |
| Power per year @ $0.15/kWh | ~$197 | ~$33 |
The small-drive pile costs about $2,600 more up front and $164 more every year to run, and it needs six times the enclosure. (Power figures assume ~5 W idle per 3.5” drive running 24/7 and a $0.15/kWh rate. Substitute your own; the ratio is what matters.)
The one case where small drives win is when you genuinely only need a few TB and buying 24 is throwing money at capacity you’ll never fill. That’s a real scenario. If you’re not sure which side of the line you’re on, the storage calculator will size it for you, and the NAS capacity guide covers Plex, backups and surveillance retention specifically.
Where the curve flattens
From 3–4 TB ($61.60/TB new) down to 18 TB ($41.36/TB new), each step up in capacity buys real savings. After that it stalls. 20 TB, 22 TB, 24 TB and 28 TB all cluster around $39–43/TB new.
So the value zone is roughly 18–24 TB, and within it you should optimise for warranty and drive model rather than chasing another dollar per TB. A concrete example of that principle: a new 18 TB WD Red Pro is $599.99 today at $33.33/TB, with a 5-year manufacturer warranty. The used 18 TB median is $30.00/TB. You are paying an 11% premium over the used market to get a new, name-brand, fully warrantied CMR NAS drive.
That is the best argument against refurb I can find in my own data, and it only shows up if you have both numbers side by side. Most “new vs refurb” advice online is written as though the gap were still 40%. At 18 TB, right now, it isn’t.
Below the value zone, the economics are punishing in both directions: 6–8 TB new is $61.83/TB, essentially identical to the 3–4 TB tier. There is no reward for stepping up from 4 TB to 8 TB. The reward starts at 10 TB.
The one thing I won’t tell you to do
Do not buy the single cheapest $/TB listing on any page, including mine.
I’ll be specific about why, using my own data. The absolute lowest $/TB in the new 6–8 TB tier today is $19.63/TB for something called HardDrive P77-6005GB: Footpeg Mount Clamps 1.5" Bar Black. It is a motorcycle part. Its part number contains “6005”, which my parser read as 6,005 GB. The cheapest listing in the 3–4 TB tier is an ancient HP enterprise 3 TB at $8.33/TB that I would not put a grocery list on.
Every price aggregator has this problem, mine included. It is why the tables above are medians and percentiles, never minima. A median is robust to one motorcycle footpeg; a minimum is defined by it.
The practical rule: use the benchmark to judge a listing you have already read. Don’t use it to pick a listing sight unseen. If a price is far below the “great deal” threshold for its tier, that is not a jackpot signal. It is a signal to go read the listing very carefully. Usually you’ll find a capacity typo, a wrong-category product, an ancient drive, a SAS interface, or a seller with no history. Occasionally you’ll find a real deal. The number tells you where to look, not what to buy.
Bottom line
As of 2 August 2026, on Amazon.com:
- New drives: ~$62/TB at 3–8 TB, ~$48/TB at 10–16 TB, ~$40/TB at 18–28 TB.
- Used and recertified: ~$41/TB at 3–4 TB, ~$30/TB at 10–20 TB, ~$27/TB at 24–28 TB.
- Best value zone: 18–24 TB. Below 10 TB you are paying a heavy small-drive tax; above 24 TB the savings stop.
- A “too good to be true” price in 2026 is usually just 2026. Check the tier, then check the listing.
These numbers move. This page is a snapshot with a date on it, which is exactly what the threads are missing, but it means the snapshot ages. For live, continuously updated pricing, the cheapest HDD per TB page ranks every drive I track by cost per terabyte, best HDD deals surfaces the biggest current movers, and refurbished HDDs covers the used market specifically. If you want to go deeper on the why, enterprise vs consumer drives explains what you’re actually paying for at the top of the range.
Next time you have a listing open and you’ve done the division. You have a number to check it against. Bookmark this one, or just take the tier medians with you.
Prices in this article were pulled from live Amazon.com listings on 2 August 2026 and cover internal 3.5” SATA hard drives. HDDHunt earns a commission on purchases made through links on this site, at no extra cost to you. See the affiliate disclosure.