I've noticed refurbished HDD prices creeping up recently. I used to grab 10TB drives from goharddrive for around $80, but they’ve been out of stock for months. Now most other sellers are listing them closer to $150. Has anyone else seen this trend too?
I would like to see a chart that compares the disk price costs, versus cloud storage costs over the last 10 years.
It seems like they haven’t really kept pace at all.
Obviously cloud providers have many costs other than disks, but I’m a bit disappointed by how much more expensive it is.
I wish I had known about this site when I was writing [1]. If we use warranties as our expected lifecycle, this lets me drop down from $5 per TB-year of storage down to almost $2 per TB-year. What immense savings compared to the cloud!
Thanks! Included yours and it's coming in at #3 for $0.032 per gram of protein. Pretty good! Since I made this tool I've realized how much the prices actually swing. Very common to see price changes of 20-30% per daily update for a few products.
The best value HD on that list, among ones I'd want to buy for NAS use, is a Seagate 28TB for $480. An LTO-9 tape is 45TB for $90. I found a USB-C (because why not) LTO-9 drive for $6,499.
The crossover price is at 448TB, where the total cost of 16 HD drives is $7,680, but tape drive + 10 tapes is "only" $7,399.
Huh. That's a lot lower than I would've expected. That's a very manageable price for the kind of business that wants someone to take a backup offsite nightly, and is probably a whole awful lot more robust for that kind of regular transportation.
And if you want the same disk from Dell (without any warranty or support), you take the highest price you can find and multiply it by five (after VAR discounts, ten without discounts).
I picked a random Seagate 8TB drive that the site lists as costing $103. It's GBP 145 in the UK (~EUR 166) and as much as EUR 200 in my Eastern Europe country!
Depending on where you live, Amazon might be one of the more expensive options. I've bought disks from a smaller Dutch website for our home server, for about 3€ cheaper per TB than Amazon's best offer. There's much better places to get IT stuff in Europe.
... it is distressingly common for Amazon sellers to resell used and/or refurbished drives as brand new.
We generally source drives in much larger quantities from specific suppliers we have relationships with.
However, once in a while we are forced to look at what can be quickly or easily sourced from Amazon and it is only with the utmost caution that we do so.
As can be seen in the link above, sometimes our proofing process reveals bad actors.
This is very cool. It's immediately going in the stash of links I label as tools. I'll share with a couple of other people who I know will appreciate it as well. Thanks for building and sharing!
It would be nice to have an export to csv option for the results of a given search. I saw that the HTML includes all models of devices rather than just what's being displayed. Automating the output to a file would be a nice-to-have feature.
However, I discovered that the table was formatted well enough that I was able to copy the results directly into a spreadsheet. The "Price per TB" header and the "Price" header were flipped, so I corrected them. But this means that I don't trust the spreadsheet to be without other errors (especially as some cells in the web page were blank or empty). If I see something in spreadsheet that grabs my interest, I'm going to assume that it's wrong until I confirm that it's right, but that's not a big deal if errors are few. Time will tell.
Thanks again! This is awesome, plus so minimal and lightweight. I love it.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 44.8 ms ] threadI would love to hear if anyone has any similar purely functional and utilitarian site suggestions
Pretty expensive for anything semi-recent (as in, past 6 years, 20TB+). what happened?
It seems like they haven’t really kept pace at all. Obviously cloud providers have many costs other than disks, but I’m a bit disappointed by how much more expensive it is.
[1]: https://andrew-quinn.me/digital-resiliency-2025/#postscript-...
https://www.proteinmath.app/
Diskprices.com makes $5k/month with affiliate marketing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39066480 - Jan 2024 (118 comments)
Disk Prices - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33377826 - Oct 2022 (65 comments)
Disk Prices on Amazon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22156292 - Jan 2020 (222 comments)
The best value HD on that list, among ones I'd want to buy for NAS use, is a Seagate 28TB for $480. An LTO-9 tape is 45TB for $90. I found a USB-C (because why not) LTO-9 drive for $6,499.
The crossover price is at 448TB, where the total cost of 16 HD drives is $7,680, but tape drive + 10 tapes is "only" $7,399.
Huh. That's a lot lower than I would've expected. That's a very manageable price for the kind of business that wants someone to take a backup offsite nightly, and is probably a whole awful lot more robust for that kind of regular transportation.
Does anybody remember the name?
Found it, it is:
https://www.productchart.com/ssd_drives/
I picked a random Seagate 8TB drive that the site lists as costing $103. It's GBP 145 in the UK (~EUR 166) and as much as EUR 200 in my Eastern Europe country!
I'm blaming tariffs and VAT. The EU sucks.
As described in this post:
https://kozubik.com/items/MaestroTechnology/
... it is distressingly common for Amazon sellers to resell used and/or refurbished drives as brand new.
We generally source drives in much larger quantities from specific suppliers we have relationships with.
However, once in a while we are forced to look at what can be quickly or easily sourced from Amazon and it is only with the utmost caution that we do so.
As can be seen in the link above, sometimes our proofing process reveals bad actors.
It would be nice to have an export to csv option for the results of a given search. I saw that the HTML includes all models of devices rather than just what's being displayed. Automating the output to a file would be a nice-to-have feature.
However, I discovered that the table was formatted well enough that I was able to copy the results directly into a spreadsheet. The "Price per TB" header and the "Price" header were flipped, so I corrected them. But this means that I don't trust the spreadsheet to be without other errors (especially as some cells in the web page were blank or empty). If I see something in spreadsheet that grabs my interest, I'm going to assume that it's wrong until I confirm that it's right, but that's not a big deal if errors are few. Time will tell.
Thanks again! This is awesome, plus so minimal and lightweight. I love it.
Works for an amazingly large set of products!