When Will HDD Prices Drop? The 2027–2028 Hard Drive Shortage Outlook

If you’ve read why HDD prices are rising in 2026, the very next question is the one everyone actually cares about: okay — so when do they come back down? Will hard drive prices drop in 2027? How long will this shortage actually last?

I track the live $/TB floor across Amazon US every day, and I read every earnings call and named-outlet report on this. So let me give you the honest forward look instead of a hopeful one — because the answer changes what you should do this month.

The short version: don’t plan your build around a price drop. The supply for 2026 is sold out, the biggest buyers have pre-booked 2027 and 2028, and analysts expect demand to keep outrunning supply through 2028. There is no near-term trigger for a crash. If you need the capacity, the winning move isn’t waiting — it’s buying strategically at today’s value end.

Here’s the reasoning, with the named sources.

What actually has to happen for prices to fall

Prices drop when supply catches up with demand. That’s the whole mechanism. So the useful question isn’t “when will prices drop?” in the abstract — it’s “when does the supply side catch the demand side?” And on the numbers the industry itself is publishing, the answer is: not soon.

Morgan Stanley’s June 2026 analysis (via cloudnews.tech) put HDD demand growth at roughly 40-50% a year against supply capacity advancing only 30-35% — a gap that, if it holds, is a shortage “that could last at least through 2028.” When demand structurally outpaces supply for years, the price doesn’t drift back down; it stays elevated until one side of that equation breaks.

Nothing on the published roadmaps breaks it in 2027. That’s the crux of the forward outlook.

The manufacturers have already booked 2027 and 2028

This is the part that makes the timing predictable rather than a guess. You don’t have to forecast demand — the manufacturers have already told you how much of their future output is spoken for.

• Tom’s Hardware reports Western Digital is “already sold out of hard drives for all of 2026,” with the chief saying long-term agreements for 2027 and 2028 are already in place with top customers.
• XDA frames the same news from a NAS owner’s chair: “Western Digital is sold out of hard drives through 2026, and NAS owners should be paying attention.” Prices surged nearly 50% in months while manufacturers prioritized industrial datacenter clients over consumers — which is exactly why the drive you want for your 4-bay NAS costs what it does.
• Tom’s Hardware again, and the broader industry coverage, has WD and Seagate signing record five-year supply agreements: Seagate’s nearline capacity committed through 2028, some WD agreements reportedly stretching into 2029, with nearline lead times of six months to two years.

Put those together and the timeline draws itself. When a duopoly sells out the current year and pre-commits years two and three to the customers who buy 50,000 drives at a time, there is no loose capacity to flow back into the retail channel and pull prices down. The shelf you and I shop from doesn’t loosen up on its own until those contracts are satisfied and new capacity has caught demand — and that’s a 2028-and-beyond conversation, not a 2027 one.

Will HDD prices drop in 2027?

Directly: unlikely to any degree that changes your buying math. 2027 capacity is partly pre-committed under those long-term agreements, and demand is still forecast to grow faster than supply through 2028. A modest easing is possible — if AI-datacenter buying cools, or if Seagate’s and WD’s HAMR high-capacity drives ramp volume faster than roadmapped, some pressure comes off. But the base case, built on signed contracts and published analyst forecasts rather than hope, is elevated, sticky prices — not a return to 2024 levels.

Will HDD prices drop in 2028?

This is where the first realistic window opens, and even then it’s “maybe, partially.” 2028 is the year the current allocation contracts start rolling off and the year new HAMR capacity is meaningfully in volume. If demand growth also decelerates from today’s 40-50%, supply could finally catch up and prices could soften. But “soften from a doubled-and-plateaued level” is not “crash back to the cheap-drive era.” The 2023-2024 sub-$14/TB prices were partly a post-COVID, post-Chia glut — an anomaly, not a baseline. Even a healthy 2028 supply recovery lands prices well above that floor.

Where prices stand right now (so you have a baseline)

To keep this consistent with the sister analysis and its live $/TB trend chart: as of late September 2026 the typical new high-capacity CMR drive is holding near $50/TB, up roughly 100-200% over the last 18 months, and the crunch has plateaued at those elevated levels rather than easing. The single cheapest raw $/TB you can dig up sits in the low-to-mid $20s — on a small clearance drive you pay for in bays and power — and the sub-$14/TB deals people still quote from 2024 are simply gone.

I won’t freeze an exact figure here because it moves daily; the live cheapest $/TB by capacity page is the real-time number. But the shape is clear: high, plateaued, and not falling.

So what do you do instead of waiting?

If waiting for 2027 is a bad bet — and on the contracts and forecasts above, it is — then the play is to buy strategically now. That doesn’t mean panic-buy the first listing at whatever it costs. It means:

1. Buy at the value end of today’s shelf, not the median. The gap between a good deal and a typical listing is a certain saving available today, which beats waiting for an uncertain price drop with no trigger. The daily-updated best HDD deals and cheapest $/TB by capacity pages exist for exactly this.
2. Don’t assume bigger is cheaper — the shortage scrambled that rule. Let the live per-TB table pick your capacity band rather than a rule of thumb; the “just size up to save” logic no longer holds cleanly.
3. Right-size the whole build before you spend. If you’re speccing a NAS, the NAS storage calculator works out usable capacity and cost from live drive prices, so you buy the capacity you actually need at the best $/TB — not a panicked over-buy.
4. If you truly don’t need it yet, waiting costs nothing — just don’t wait expecting 2024 prices. The buy now or wait? decision, and the live widget at the bottom of this page, put real numbers on that trade-off from today’s shelf.

The honest forward outlook is that hard drive prices are structurally locked in through 2027 and likely into 2028. “When will prices drop?” has a disappointing answer, but a clear one — and clarity is what lets you buy well instead of waiting for a rescue that the signed contracts guarantee isn’t coming.

If you want the why behind all this — the AI datacenter demand, the NAND squeeze, the duopoly — read why HDD prices are rising in 2026. And if you’re wondering whether the “sold out” headlines mean you literally can’t buy a drive, here’s what “sold out” actually means for a normal buyer (spoiler: you can still buy today).