Every verdict we publish, in one table, recomputed from live prices rather than written once and left to rot. 31 questions currently have an answer. Each page states the criterion it used, shows the runner-up and the margin, and logs when the answer last changed.
Recomputed every refresh · last updated
| Question | Current winner | Price | Per unit | Field | Last changed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4TB Hard Drive | WD Ultrastar 7K4000 4TB SATA NAS | $179.57 | $44.89/TB | 8 | 2026-08-19 |
| 6TB Hard Drive | Seagate IronWolf 6TB NAS ST6000VN001 | $389.45 | $64.91/TB | 5 | 2026-08-19 |
| 8TB Hard Drive | Seagate IronWolf 8TB NAS ST8000VNZ04 | $329.99 | $41.25/TB | 15 | 2026-08-19 |
| 10TB Hard Drive | WD Ultrastar 10TB SATA HUH721010ALE600 | $379.00 | $37.90/TB | 15 | 2026-08-19 |
| 12TB Hard Drive | WD Ultrastar 12TB SATA HUH721212ALE601 | $339.99 | $28.33/TB | 8 | 2026-08-19 |
| 14TB Hard Drive | WD Ultrastar 14TB SATA WUH721414ALE6L4 | $499.99 | $35.71/TB | 6 | 2026-08-19 |
| 16TB Hard Drive | Seagate SkyHawk AI 16TB ST16000VE000 | $684.45 | $42.78/TB | 6 | 2026-08-19 |
| 18TB Hard Drive | Seagate Exos X20 18TB SATA | $675.89 | $37.55/TB | 6 | 2026-08-19 |
| 20TB Hard Drive | MDD 20TB SATA 7200RPM NAS | $499.99 | $25.00/TB | 8 | 2026-08-19 |
| 22TB Hard Drive | Seagate Exos X22 22TB | $649.99 | $29.55/TB | 3 | 2026-08-19 |
| 24TB Hard Drive | WD Ultrastar 24TB SATA WUH722424ALE6L4 | $749.99 | $31.25/TB | 7 | 2026-08-19 |
| Question | Current winner | Price | Per unit | Field | Last changed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Refurbished 4TB Hard Drive | HGST HUS726040ALS210 4TB SAS 12G | $72.52 | $18.13/TB | 16 | 2026-08-19 |
| Refurbished 6TB Hard Drive | MDD 6TB SAS 12G 7200RPM | $109.99 | $18.33/TB | 17 | 2026-08-19 |
| Refurbished 8TB Hard Drive | Dell M40TH 8TB SAS 12G 512E | $205.00 | $25.63/TB | 14 | 2026-08-19 |
| Refurbished 10TB Hard Drive | HGST Ultrastar He10 10TB SAS 12G | $235.00 | $23.50/TB | 20 | 2026-08-19 |
| Refurbished 12TB Hard Drive | WD Ultrastar 12TB SAS HUH721212AL5204 | $319.00 | $26.58/TB | 19 | 2026-08-19 |
| Refurbished 14TB Hard Drive | MDD 14TB SATA 6G 7200RPM 256MB Enterprise | $329.99 | $23.57/TB | 8 | 2026-08-19 |
| Refurbished 16TB Hard Drive | Seagate IronWolf Pro 16TB NAS ST16000NE000 | $449.99 | $28.12/TB | 6 | 2026-08-19 |
| Refurbished 18TB Hard Drive | MDD 18TB SATA 6G 7200RPM NAS | $449.99 | $25.00/TB | 12 | 2026-08-19 |
| Refurbished 20TB Hard Drive | MDD 20TB SATA 7200RPM NAS | $499.99 | $25.00/TB | 8 | 2026-08-19 |
| Refurbished 22TB Hard Drive | WD Red Pro 22TB NAS WD221KFGX | $699.99 | $31.82/TB | 4 | 2026-08-19 |
| Question | Current winner | Price | Per unit | Field | Last changed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1TB NVMe SSD | Crucial P510 PCIe Gen5 NVMe 1TB SSD | $173.64 | $173.64/TB | 23 | 2026-08-19 |
| 2TB NVMe SSD | TeamGroup MP33 2TB SLC Cache 3D NAND TLC NVMe 1.3 PCIe Gen3x4 M.2 2280 Internal | $258.99 | $129.50/TB | 31 | 2026-08-19 |
| 4TB NVMe SSD | Lexar 4TB NM790 NVMe SSD w/Heatsink, 7400/6500 MB/s | $509.99 | $127.50/TB | 16 | 2026-08-19 |
| 8TB NVMe SSD | WD WD_Black SN850X 8TB NVMe SSD with Heatsink | $1379.99 | $172.50/TB | 5 | 2026-08-19 |
| Question | Current winner | Price | Per unit | Field | Last changed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 32GB DDR4 Server RAM | Samsung 32GB DDR4-2400 ECC RDIMM | $148.95 | $4.65/GB | 7 | 2026-08-19 |
| 64GB DDR4 Server RAM | Samsung 64GB DDR4-2666 ECC RDIMM | $399.00 | $6.23/GB | 3 | 2026-08-19 |
| 32GB DDR5 Server RAM | Samsung 32GB DDR5-4800 ECC RDIMM | $929.99 | $29.06/GB | 2 | 2026-08-19 |
| 64GB DDR5 Server RAM | Kingston 64GB DDR5-5600 ECC RDIMM | $2064.00 | $32.25/GB | 3 | 2026-08-19 |
| Question | Current winner | Price | Per unit | Field | Last changed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price Per Terabyte | HP 695842-001 4TB SAS 6G | $59.99 | $15.00/TB | 120 | 2026-08-19 |
| NAS Drive | MDD 20TB SATA 7200RPM NAS | $499.99 | $25.00/TB | 90 | 2026-08-19 |
Every "best 16TB drive" article on the internet was written once. It named a drive, it ranked well, and then the market moved and nobody went back. The pages it competes with have been recommending discontinued products for years, and there is no way for a reader to tell which are current, because the format gives no way to tell.
These pages fix that in the only way that actually works: the answer is computed when you load the page, from listings we hold prices for, and every page shows the field it beat. When the winner changes, the change is logged with its date. A page that has changed its answer four times in three months is telling you something true about that market, and a static article physically cannot make that claim.
The trade is that these pages are narrower than an article. They rank on price and fitness because those are the things we can observe across a whole catalogue every few hours. They do not tell you which drive is quietest, or which manufacturer handles a warranty claim best. For that you want a review, and we are not writing one.
A verdict is only as good as the field it ran over, so the exclusions matter as much as the ranking. Drives whose recording technology we could not confirm are out of every hard-drive verdict - not treated as safe, out - because recommending a shingled drive for an array is the most damaging wrong answer this section could give. Sellers we do not recognise are out, because naming an unrecognised brand as the best is worth less than naming nothing. Anything out of stock at render is out, because a verdict you cannot act on is trivia.
SAS drives are excluded from the consumer-framed pages and eligible on the refurbished and whole-market ones, where they are flagged. They are frequently the cheapest terabytes in existence and they will not work in a desktop or a consumer NAS without a host bus adapter, so both facts have to travel together.
Cheapest per TB, the full ranking · What it costs to fill a NAS · Where prices are heading · Recertified drives · CMR/SMR list · What counts as a good price
Each page ranks the drives that meet its stated criteria by cost per terabyte (or per gigabyte for memory) and names the cheapest. The criterion is printed on every page so you can disagree with it. Eligibility requires the listing to be in stock, from a brand we recognise, and - for hard drives - CMR-verified, with unknown recording technology excluded rather than assumed safe.
No. We do not run a test lab, we publish no read or write benchmarks, and no page in this section claims one drive is faster than another. These are price-and-fitness verdicts built from what we can actually observe: price, availability, capacity, interface, condition and recording technology. Anyone ranking storage by speed should tell you how they measured it.
The figures recompute on every page load; the winner changes when the market moves it. Each page logs its changes with dates, so you can see how volatile a given question is - a capacity with fifteen competing listings changes hands far more often than one with three. That log is the part a written-once article cannot produce.
Because at a fixed capacity they cannot exist honestly. Every drive of the same size holds the same number of terabytes, so ranking by cost per terabyte is arithmetically identical to ranking by price - the winner is always the cheapest listing. A budget filter can therefore only return the same drive or nothing at all. We derived eleven candidate budget pages from the data and every one collapsed into its parent, so we published none of them.
A page only exists where at least three listings meet its criteria. Below that the ranking is not a ranking, it is a list with a headline. Several capacities we track - 26TB, 30TB and 32TB among them - have a single qualifying listing each and so have no page. They will get one when the market gives them a field.