What is a good price per TB for a hard drive?

Right now a large internal HDD typically costs around 15 to 20 of your local currency units per TB, and that figure has been edging up rather than down as AI datacentre demand tightens supply. Anything a few units below your marketplace's live median (shown in the box at the top of this page) is a genuine deal.

Are bigger hard drives better value per TB?

Almost always, yes. The sweet spot tends to sit at the 14TB to 20TB range where the cost of the casing, motor and controller is spread across the most storage.

Hard Drive Price Per TB: The Live HDD Hub

Live answer · Amazon.com

Pulling live prices…

📊 As of August 2, 2026, the typical internal 3.5″ HDD on Amazon.com is $42.07/TB or $0.042/GB, widest choice around $28.19/TB, with some as cheap as $18.33/TB across 1241 live listings.

Right, let me save you twenty minutes of scrolling.

Hard drives are the only place in computing where buying the big, boring option is the smart move. Capacity is cheap. Drama is not.

The box above is pulling live prices for your marketplace right this second. That number is the only one that matters, so glance at it before you read another word.

What counts as a good price per TB?

Here is the honest rule of thumb I use as a 40 year old who hates wasting money. Right now a large HDD typically lands around 15 to 20 per TB, so use that, and the live box above, as your yardstick:

A few units under your marketplace’s median: grab it, that is a proper deal.
Around 15 to 20 per TB: fine, normal, what most big drives cost today.
Well above that: somebody is having a laugh. Walk away, or wait for a better listing.

And here is the part nobody likes to admit: for years spinning rust got steadily cheaper per terabyte, but that has flipped. The AI datacentre buildout is hoovering up high capacity drives faster than the factories can make them, so price per TB has been creeping up, not down. “I’ll just wait, it will get cheaper” is no longer a safe bet. The move that still works is the old one: buy the big capacity, never the tiny drive with the brutal per-TB cost.

Why the small drives are a trap

A 1TB or 2TB desktop HDD looks cheap on the shelf.

It is not.

You are paying nearly the same for the motor, the casing and the controller as you would on a 16TB monster, then getting a fraction of the storage. The price per TB is brutal.

Buy the capacity, not the headline price.

One spec worth checking: CMR vs SMR

Before you buy, it is worth knowing whether a drive is CMR or SMR, because SMR drives can crawl during heavy writes and behave badly in some NAS setups.

It is the one bit of small print that genuinely matters.

We go deep on it in our guide to CMR, SMR and how we tag drives, so check that before committing to a big purchase.

The HDD questions worth answering

This hub feeds a stack of Reddit style answer pages, each one backed by the same live data you see above. Datahoarders, homelabbers and backup nerds keep asking the same things, so we just answered them properly.

Scroll down for the popular questions, or use the marketplace switcher up top to lock the prices to your country. We keep one canonical view of “this is your marketplace” so the numbers are always yours, not some random US figure that does not help you in the slightest.

What counts as a good price per TB?

Why the small drives are a trap

One spec worth checking: CMR vs SMR

The HDD questions worth answering

Popular questions in this hub