Select 2–4 drives for a side-by-side spec and price comparison.
10 in-stock listings · SATA CMR, the safe default whichever comparison sent you here · ranked by live cost per tb, refreshed every few hours
Every matchup on this page computes its price gap at request time from the same catalogue the product pages read, which is the whole reason they exist. A comparison written once and left alone will keep recommending whichever drive was cheaper on the day it was published, and it will do so with complete confidence long after the market has moved underneath it. In a category where prices roughly doubled through the 2025-2026 shortage, that is a recommendation with a shelf life measured in weeks.
So read the gap at the capacity you actually intend to buy rather than the headline verdict. The gap between two product lines rarely scales smoothly: two drives can sit within a few dollars of each other at one size and hundreds apart at another, because stock depth and seller mix differ at every capacity independently. Generalising from one row to another is the most common way to get one of these decisions wrong.
Where a row prints no gap, one side has no buyable listing at that capacity right now. That is a real constraint rather than a formatting gap, and it resolves more purchases than the specification comparison does — a drive you cannot buy is not an option regardless of how it compares on paper.
They do not adjudicate performance. Specification figures appear as sourced cells from the manufacturers' own pages and nothing more, because throughput comparisons are measurements and we have not made them. That ground is already thoroughly covered by people who own the equipment to do it properly, and adding an unmeasured opinion to that pile would be worse than adding nothing.
What we can settle are the things a specification sheet genuinely decides: whether a drive physically fits, what interface it needs, what warranty and endurance the maker commits to, and what it costs per terabyte today against everything else at the same capacity. Those are facts rather than judgements, and between them they resolve most purchases before performance ever enters the conversation.