Best Hard Drives: Ranked by Cost Per Terabyte

Recomputed on every page load · last updated 2026-10-16

"Best hard drive" means a different drive depending on who is asking. Someone filling a four-bay NAS needs a SATA drive with CMR recording; someone building cheap bulk storage in a server may be best served by a retired enterprise SAS drive a NAS could never use; someone with $200 to spend wants the most terabytes that money buys. A single ranked list answers none of those well. So this page is a set of answers - one per question - each ranked by the same thing, cost per terabyte, inside the constraints that question imposes.

Best hard drives

Across the whole market

By capacity, new

By capacity, refurbished and used

By use

By budget

Also ranked: NAS boxes

The box the drives go in, ranked by cost per bay - chassis only. No NAS listing we hold includes drives, and each page says whether a listing's own title states "Diskless". Processor, memory, network, noise and power are not measured and not ranked.

Also ranked: SSDs and console storage

Consumer M.2 NVMe drives by capacity, and PS5 SSDs with a heatsink - counted as fitted only where the listing title says so. No speed or temperature figure appears on any of these pages. For the PS5 Pro, our PS5 Pro SSD guide covers the same slot.

Also ranked: server memory

ECC registered modules by cost per gigabyte. Compatibility is decided by the machine, so check it per server first.

Why cost per terabyte

Capacity is what you are buying when you buy a hard drive, and cost per terabyte is the one figure that compares drives across brands, sizes and sellers on the same footing. It is also something we can observe for every listing we track, about once a day, which is the property that lets these answers be recomputed instead of written once. A ranking by a quality we cannot observe would have to be asserted, and an asserted ranking ages the moment it is published.

It is the right primary axis and the wrong only axis. The constraints each page applies are what turn a price list into a recommendation: the interface your machine can take, the recording technology an array needs, the condition you are willing to buy, a brand we will name. Those are printed as the criterion on every page, so if your constraints are different you can see exactly where your answer would diverge from ours.

How to read a verdict

Each verdict page shows three things worth more than the winner's name. The field size tells you how much competition the winner beat: a page ranking twelve listings is a stronger answer than one ranking four. The margin to the runner-up tells you how fragile the answer is: a few cents per terabyte can change hands with one seller's price update. And the change log tells you how often the question has had a different answer, which is the most useful single signal for deciding whether to buy now or wait a week.

Why these are not articles

Most "best hard drive" articles were written once. They named a drive, ranked well, and then the market moved and nobody went back. These pages are computed when you load them, from listings we hold prices for, and every page shows the field its winner 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 written-once article cannot.

What we exclude, and why

Where a page promises CMR - the NAS and surveillance verdicts - it admits only drives whose CMR recording is sourced to the maker for their exact part number; unknown recording technology is out there, because recommending a shingled drive for an array is the harm that rule exists to prevent. The capacity, recertified, budget and price-per-TB rankings are price rankings, so they rank every qualifying drive and badge each row CMR, SMR or not sourced: excluding drives whose maker publishes no recording data would select on paperwork, not price. Sellers we do not recognise are out everywhere, and 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 often the cheapest terabytes available and they will not work in a desktop or a consumer NAS without a host bus adapter, so both facts travel together.

What we do not measure

We do not measure speed, noise, power draw, temperature or endurance, and no page here ranks on any of them. Where a reader would reasonably expect one - noise for a NAS in a living room, heat for a console drive, workload ratings for a camera recorder - the page says that it is not measured rather than ranking as if it did not matter. If the honest answer to a question depends mostly on something we cannot observe, we do not build that page: that is why there is no "best drive for RAID 6" here (cost per usable terabyte orders drives exactly as cost per terabyte does, so it would repeat the NAS answer) and no "best drive for backup" (it would repeat our external-drive ranking while implying a judgement about reliability we cannot make).

Related

Cheapest per TB, the full ranking · What it costs to fill a NAS · Where hard drive prices are heading · Recertified drives · CMR/SMR list · What counts as a good price

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