We do not predict prices. This page shows where external drives prices actually are, what our own daily snapshots have done, the supply-side facts we have cited, and a directional outlook that carries the date it applies to and the list of things that would prove it wrong. As of 2026-08-18 the floor is $25.51/TB across 134 in-stock listings.
Live figures updated · refreshed every 4-5 hours · outlook reviewed monthly
Three families, priced separately. A single blended external-drive average would move when the product mix moved and report that as the market - the error this cluster corrects everywhere it appears.
| Family | Listings | Floor $/TB | Median $/TB |
|---|---|---|---|
| Desktop external HDD | 22 | $29.97 | $41.38 |
| Portable external HDD | 61 | $25.51 | $59.75 |
| Portable SSD | 51 | $105.00 | $199.98 |
Portable external HDD currently holds the cheapest terabyte of the three at $25.51/TB. The gap between families is larger than the gap between models inside any one of them, which is why choosing the family is the decision that actually moves your cost.
Daily average price per TB across all tracked SATA enterprise HDDs, daily floor TB, tracked since 2026-03-23. Live data from the DatacenterDisk price tracker — updates every 2 hours. Window reflects the actual history in our database, not a modeled projection.
Every row says where its numbers came from. Reported rows are figures published by others, cited and dated - we did not measure them. Measured rows are our own series, computed from our daily snapshots. Mixing the two without saying which is which is how a page ends up citing itself.
| What | Then | Now | Provenance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Our tracked external drives floor, per TB | $17.73 (2026-03-23) | $30.02 (2026-08-18) | Measured by us |
As of 2026-08-18, 14 of 101 scored external drives sit above their own recent typical level, 63 sit at the cheap end of their own record, and 24 are priced where they usually are. That distribution is the answer to “has waiting been working” - it is a count of badge states, not a price comparison.
In-stock only, cheapest per terabyte first.
| Product | Capacity | Condition | Price | Per TB | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seagate Seagate Expansion 6TB Portable HDD | 6TB | Refurb | $153.04 | $25.51 | Buy |
| WD WD My Book 22TB Desktop HDD | 22TB | New | $659.44 | $29.97 | Buy |
| Seagate Seagate Expansion 16TB Desktop HDD | 16TB | New | $483.12 | $30.20 | Buy |
| Seagate Seagate Expansion 24TB Portable HDD | 24TB | New | $730.47 | $30.44 | Buy |
| WD WD My Passport 6TB Portable HDD | 6TB | Refurb | $189.99 | $31.67 | Buy |
| WD WD Elements 20TB Desktop HDD | 20TB | Refurb | $658.33 | $32.92 | Buy |
| Seagate Seagate Expansion 10TB Desktop HDD | 10TB | New | $334.78 | $33.48 | Buy |
| WD WD My Book 8TB Desktop HDD | 8TB | Refurb | $269.99 | $33.75 | Buy |
Every figure in this section is read from our own catalogue at the moment you loaded the page, and it is a LEVELS observation rather than a rate. The floor is the single cheapest in-stock listing per terabyte; it can move because one cheap listing appeared or vanished, without the market having done anything. That is why percentage changes on this site come from a matched-model index that compares each listing against its own prior price, and never from comparing one day's floor to another's.
As of 2026-08-18, the floor sits at $25.51/TB and the median across 134 in-stock listings at $74.73/TB. The gap between those two is worth as much as either number on its own: a floor far below the median means the cheap end is one or two listings deep, and a floor close to it means the whole catalogue is priced tightly together.
The two condition tracks price separately and we never merge them. New stock starts at $29.97/TB and the refurbished track at $25.51/TB. A refurbished floor well below the new one is the ordinary state of this market rather than a bargain signal, and scoring one against the other would manufacture a discount that does not exist.
The picks table further down carries the same data at row level, in stock only, so a reader who decides to act can do so without leaving the page. It never shows an out-of-stock row, which is why you will not find an empty price cell anywhere in this cluster.
Our snapshots for this category begin on 2026-03-23 and run to 2026-08-18, which is 149 days of daily observations. That window is stated because a trend without its window is not checkable, and because 149 days is a real but modest history - long enough to show a level, short enough that a single unusual month shapes it.
Over the most recent 30 days of that series - 2026-07-19 to 2026-08-18 - the daily floor moved from $16.63/TB to $30.02/TB, a change of +80.6%. Read that as what the cheapest listing did, not as what the market did.
The chart is a levels series by design. A levels chart answers 'what does the cheap end cost' and it answers it honestly; it does not answer 'has the market moved', because a single listing entering or leaving changes it. Both questions are legitimate and they need different instruments, so we do not use one chart to imply the other.
The first thing to say about this category is that forecasting it as one thing would be a mistake, and it is a mistake with a name on this site. A desktop external hard drive, a bus-powered portable hard drive and a portable SSD differ by roughly a factor of three in cost per terabyte. Averaging them produces a number that moves when the product mix moves, and reports that as though the market moved. We made exactly that error once with microSD Express cards, where an unmatched average said Express was 9% CHEAPER than standard cards when a capacity-matched comparison said it was 65% dearer. So this page decomposes by family and forecasts each separately.
The externals story that matters is the one our own tracking found: the enclosure premium has closed. For most of a decade the drive inside an external enclosure cost less to buy bare, and the entire practice of shucking existed to capture that difference. Our live comparison now puts new external desktop drives at effective parity with bare internal SATA drives per terabyte, and ahead on used listings.
That is a smaller claim than the one circulating elsewhere, and deliberately so. Externals are NOT the cheapest storage in the market: the cheapest cost per terabyte we track sits on internal hard drives, and at matched capacities the external is the cheaper option at a minority of the capacities where both are stocked. What has changed is that the premium which used to be reliable is now approximately zero, which is a structural change worth understanding without inflating it.
On the supply side the two halves of this category answer to different constraints. The HDD families sit under the same nearline tightness that drives the internal market - reported lead times in the region of 52 weeks, a major manufacturer reported sold out of nearline capacity, and HAMR raising capacity per drive rather than drives per month. The portable SSD family sits under NAND contract pricing, where TrendForce revised its own 1Q26 forecast upward from 33-38% to 55-60% QoQ in February 2026.
Directionally, as of the date above, and stated per family because the families do not share a mechanism.
Desktop external HDDs: no reversal signal. This family inherits the nearline constraint, and the enclosure has stopped functioning as a discount mechanism relative to bare drives. The value case here is now about convenience and warranty rather than about beating the internal market on price, which is a change from the position that held for most of the last decade.
Portable external HDDs: the weakest read of the three, and we say so. This family competes with both portable SSDs above it and desktop externals below it, and its cost per terabyte reflects a shrinking niche more than a supply constraint. We do not have a confident direction here.
Portable SSDs: cost pressure upward, following NAND. This family is priced out of the same contract market as internal NVMe drives, and the trackers that cover it revised upward rather than down at the start of the year. Of the three families this is the one where waiting has the clearest cost.
This is the section that makes the rest of the page worth citing. An outlook with no stated falsifiers cannot be wrong, and a claim that cannot be wrong is not information. Here is exactly what we are watching, and what each of these moving would mean:
The enclosure premium REOPENING. Our comparison recomputes on every load; if external desktop drives drift back above bare internal drives per terabyte across weeks rather than days, the structural claim on this page is wrong and shucking becomes worth doing again.
Nearline lead times shortening in reported industry figures. That would ease the HDD families regardless of what any individual listing does.
NAND contract prices turning down. The portable SSD family follows them, and a downward revision of the size of February's upward one would change that family's read on its own.
Our own per-family floors holding lower across weeks. Each family has its own floor on this page for exactly this reason - a move in one is not evidence about the others.
In-stock breadth recovering across families. A category where more of the catalogue is buyable has slack in it.
We check these monthly and publish the result as a dated check-in whether or not the read changed. An outlook that never revises is not being tested.
Decide the family before you compare prices, because comparing across families is the error this page is built to prevent. A portable SSD and a desktop external are not competing products at different prices; they are different products, and the cost per terabyte gap between them is mostly physics rather than value.
If you were planning to shuck to save money, check the current comparison first. The premium that made shucking worthwhile has closed on new listings, and buying the external for the enclosure and the warranty is now a reasonable choice rather than a lazy one.
If you want the cheapest terabyte available and portability is not a requirement, an internal drive still wins - our cross-category floors put internal hard drives well below every external family. This page will not pretend otherwise to keep you in the category you happen to be reading about.
These are the things that would change the outlook above. They are checked in every monthly edition, and the edition says so whether or not any of them moved.
Every monthly edition, newest first, archived rather than overwritten. Each one opens by stating what the previous edition said and what our data actually did - an archive that never grades itself is a blog, not a record.
The main forecast page covers the method and the hard drive picture in full · what counts as a good price · the cheapest per terabyte right now · hard drive forecast · SSD forecast · server RAM forecast · PS5 SSD forecast · used drive forecast · the storage crisis tracker follows the category-level picture.
It depends which family, which is why this page forecasts three separately. Desktop external hard drives inherit the nearline supply constraint that has pushed the internal market up, and we see no reversal signal there. Portable SSDs follow NAND contract pricing, which the industry's own trackers revised upward rather than down at the start of 2026. Portable hard drives are the family we have the least confident read on, and we say so rather than manufacturing a direction. The live floors for all three are above, each with its own listing count.
If you need one, the cost side is not currently working in your favour and there is no signal that it will start to. Portable SSDs are priced out of the same NAND contract market as internal NVMe drives, and TrendForce revised its own 1Q26 NAND forecast upward from 33-38% to 55-60% QoQ in February 2026 rather than down. That does not make today's price good; it makes waiting an unhedged bet against a market whose trackers keep revising the wrong way for buyers. If capacity rather than speed is what you actually need, the external HDD families cost a fraction as much per terabyte.
Cheaper than the bare drive inside them, roughly yes - the enclosure premium has closed to about parity on new listings and inverted on used ones, which is a real change from the decade before it. Cheapest in the market, no. The lowest cost per terabyte we track sits on internal hard drives, and at capacities where both are stocked the external is the cheaper option at a minority of them. We are stating the smaller version of this claim because it is the one our data supports.
The financial case has largely gone. Shucking existed to capture a premium that reliably sat between the external and the bare drive inside it, and our tracking shows that premium at approximately zero on new listings. You still lose the warranty, you still risk the drive inside not being the model you expected, and you now save little or nothing for it. If you enjoy doing it, nothing here stops you; if you were doing it purely for the money, check the current comparison before you buy.
Desktop external hard drives on the typical price, and the table above shows why that needs saying carefully. Desktop drives use 3.5-inch mechanisms with mains power and no size constraint, so their MEDIAN cost per terabyte is far below the portable family. The FLOOR is a different matter: a single discounted portable listing can and currently does hold the cheapest terabyte on the board, because a floor is one listing and moves when that listing appears or vanishes. Read the median column to choose a family and the floor column to catch a deal - conflating them is the single most common way to misread a price table. Portable SSDs sit far above both, because you are paying for flash rather than capacity.
External SSDs are identified by their catalogue type. On the hard drive side the catalogue does not carry a form-factor column, so we classify from the model name and capacity - portable lines and small capacities to the portable bucket, everything else to desktop. That is an imperfect split and we would rather state its method than imply a precision we do not have. It is accurate enough to keep a portable SSD out of a desktop HDD average, which is the error that actually distorts a forecast.