Right now, a good SATA HDD price is under $45/TB. The market's best available is $20.00/TB on refurbished enterprise stock. Anything approaching that floor is an excellent buy; anything above $54/TB means you are paying a above the upper quartile of current tracked listings.
| Signal | Question answered | Data used | Output |
|---|---|---|---|
| Market Value | Is this listing competitive with relevant products available now? | Current use class, interface, condition, capacity band, and $/TB | Excellent, Good, Average, or Expensive |
| Historical Value | Is today favorable for this exact drive condition? | Current listing and stored observations evaluated in the background | GREAT PRICE, GOOD PRICE, FAIR PRICE, HIGH PRICE, or a progress indicator |
Historical Value compares a listing only with its own stored price record for that exact drive and condition. GREAT PRICE means today's price is within 3% of the lowest we have recorded for it, or at least 15% below its own 30- or 90-day average; GOOD PRICE, within 7% of that low or at least 7% below its 30-day average; HIGH PRICE, more than 7% above its own 30-day average; FAIR PRICE otherwise. It reads In progress when we hold fewer than 7 days of records, or when the price has never moved more than 3% across its record - an unchanged price is neither a low nor a high, so it gets no verdict.
The two columns can disagree and both be right: Market Value asks whether a listing is cheap next to comparable drives on sale today, Historical Value asks whether it is cheap next to its own past. A small drive can be Expensive per TB against its peers and still be at the lowest price it has ever had.
Historical dollar amounts remain hidden where the source policy requires it. The qualitative Good Price state can still use stored observations without displaying a restricted price-history series.
Take the price you are looking at, divide by the drive's capacity in TB, and find your number in the column for that drive type. The thresholds below are computed live from the current in-stock market — the "Excellent" band sits near the live floor, while "Expensive" sits above the 75th percentile of what is actually selling.
| Verdict | SATA HDD | SAS HDD | NVMe SSD |
|---|---|---|---|
| Excellent | ≤ $22/TB | ≤ $16/TB | ≤ $132/TB |
| Good | ≤ $45/TB | ≤ $40/TB | ≤ $226/TB |
| Fair | ≤ $54/TB | ≤ $50/TB | ≤ $297/TB |
| Expensive | > $54/TB | > $50/TB | > $297/TB |
Thresholds recompute about once a day from live in-stock inventory. Compare within a category only — never judge an NVMe price against an HDD benchmark.
A fixed threshold eventually goes stale because capacity mix, conditions, interfaces, and available sellers change. A number remembered from an earlier market can describe neither the current peer set nor the exact product's recent range.
The live table avoids that problem by deriving its floor, median, upper quartile, average, and listing count from the same current inventory snapshot. Those values are Market Value benchmarks; they do not replace the per-product Historical Value signal.
But here is the nuance the consumer commentary misses: our live data shows the real enterprise floor is lower than the mainstream advice suggests. Refurbished enterprise SATA is trading at $20.00/TB right now. That gap between a remembered rule and the current enterprise floor is exactly why a live benchmark is more useful than a static number.
Best (the live floor), median (the typical in-stock price), 75th percentile (where "overpriced" begins), and the count of in-stock drives behind each figure. All computed live.
| Category | Best $/TB | Median | P75 | Avg | In stock |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SATA HDD | $20.00 | $44.69 | $53.84 | $48.82 | 239 |
| SAS HDD | $14.99 | $39.58 | $49.75 | $41.51 | 89 |
| NVMe SSD | $119.74 | $226.00 | $296.98 | $288.20 | 89 |
| LTO Tape | $4.89 | $6.42 | $6.67 | $6.61 | 7 |
Explore the full ranking behind these numbers on the cheapest per TB page.
Hard drive manufacturing cost is largely fixed per unit. The controller board, spindle motor, actuator, head assembly, and enclosure cost roughly the same whether the drive holds 4TB or 24TB — capacity comes from adding platters and packing bits denser, which is cheap relative to the fixed hardware. Spreading that fixed cost over more terabytes often improves $/TB, but capacity availability and launch premiums can interrupt that pattern. See the live floor at each size on the cheapest per TB rankings and per-capacity pages like 20TB HDDs.
New and non-new listings are separated below because their price and risk profiles are not interchangeable. The calculated saving appears only when both condition groups have current qualifying inventory.
| Category | Best new $/TB | Best refurb $/TB | Refurb saving |
|---|---|---|---|
| SATA HDD | $29.17 | $20.00 | 31% |
| SAS HDD | $17.00 | $14.99 | 12% |
| NVMe SSD | $137.19 | $119.74 | 13% |
Condition labels are kept as specific as the source allows. Do not assume that used, renewed, seller-refurbished, and manufacturer-recertified inventory carry the same testing, warranty, or support. Browse current non-new listings on the used hard drive price page.
Inventory mix, capacity launches, seller availability, component costs, and demand can all move the benchmark. Market Value therefore uses current peers, while Historical Value checks the exact product. For the broader market discussion, read hard drive prices are up 50% in 2026.
For SATA HDDs, the current tracked floor is $20.00/TB and the live median is $44.69/TB. A listing near the floor has strong Market Value, but its Historical Value still depends on the exact product's stored observations.
Compare that figure with the live SATA HDD floor of $20.00/TB, median of $44.69/TB, and upper quartile of $53.84/TB. Then check the exact listing's Historical Value; a market-relative price can still be high for that product.
Inventory mix, capacity, condition, interface, seller availability, and market supply all change the live floor and median. Fixed dollar rules age quickly, which is why the benchmark table is computed from current qualifying listings.
The lowest live price per TB across everything we track is $4.89/TB in the LTO Tape category. That figure updates about once a day; the live benchmark table on this page always shows the current floor for each category.
No. HDD and SSD serve different roles and their $/TB figures are not interchangeable. Enterprise NVMe runs many times the cost per TB of HDD but delivers vastly higher IOPS and lower latency. Compare within a category — SATA HDD against SATA HDD, NVMe against NVMe — and choose the category by workload, then optimize $/TB inside it.
It is a valid cost comparison but not an equivalent risk comparison. Keep used, renewed, seller-refurbished, and manufacturer-recertified labels distinct, then compare warranty visibility, seller terms, workload, redundancy, and replacement planning.
About once a day per listing, All figures on this page — best, median, 75th percentile, and average per category — are computed live from in-stock drives in our database each time the page loads, and prices refresh from Amazon US on a 2-hour cron cycle. The freshness timestamp near the top shows the most recent refresh.
Related report: The 2026 Storage Buyer\u2019s Reality Report — live benchmarks + the counterfeit checklist