Choosing the Best Hard Drive for Price per Terabyte or Gigabyte
One question that storage users who are more concerned about the longevity and future-proofing of their storage ask us is:
“HDD Price per TB (best cost Hard Drives). Is it better to get bigger size drives or smaller drives but more of them to achieve desired storage space?”
Yes, this is a popular question indeed, especially with bigger size hard drives. Those drives tend to be much more expensive per terabyte. It is often cheaper to get an additional drive which is smaller and gain the same total capacity (using two or 3 drives) cheaper.
How to calculate price per GB / TB?
If a 4 TB hard drive (let’s say 4000 MB, for simplicity’s sake) costs $50, how much is that per GB?
4 TB = 4000 GB $50 / 4000 GB = 0,0125 $/GB $0,0125 x 1000 = 12.5 $/TB
How to use the Price per Terabyte Calculator table below?
Below you will find our automatic hard drive price per TB/GB tool, designed to crawl many, MANY different eShops and divide their cost between the available storage. This allows us to rank/list these drives by the largest amount of terabytes youwill get for your money. This list includes popular hard drive manufacturers, such as Seagate, WD and Toshiba, allowing you to ensure that you are getting excellent value for money on your storage, as well as only choosing the most reputable HDD makers in the world. Before you head down there though, take a moment to quick familiarize yourself with a few key factors that will aid you in understanding how to understand what separates one HDD from another
CMR VS SMR HDDs
You can filter CMR drives only if you need better performance (more info). SMR drives are acceptable in RAID1/0 or no raid setup.
Seagate VS WD Hard Drives?
You can go brand specific such as Seagate, WD, and Toshiba. WD might offer things like OptiNAND
| WD Hard Drive Buyers Guide | Seagate Hard Drive Buyers Guide |
Home vs Business Hard Drives, is there a difference?
You can also choose a specific type of drives such as for home use you would use a filter (WD Red or Ironwolf. For business use in a NAS with 8 bays and above filter would look like WD RED Pro or Ironwolf Pro. For enterprise drives, you would choose Exos, HGST, Gold or Ultrastar. For surveillance, you would choose a filter “purple” or “Surveillance”. For simple desktop use you would choose Barracuda, Black or Blue drives. The colours are explained here.
6TB vs 8TB, or 10TB vs 20TB – Which is Best?
You may choose bigger capacity drives if you have fewer drive bays on your NAS. This limits your options for mixing drives smarter way. You might realise that bigger drives but fewer of them can actually be cheaper than smaller drives that use every drive bay.
| NOTE – Use the GREEN Bar (ideally for NAS users) to enter your number of bays, RAID failure protection level, budget and whether you want NAS optimized drives only |
| Note – Use the YELLOW Bar to filter the results by brand, price per TB range, strict capacity and recording method |
LAST UPDATED: May 4, 2024 16:18
| $29.38 | Synology HAT5300-8T HAT5300-8T | 8TB | CMR | 235 | Link |
| $38.71 | Synology Synology HAT5300-12T 12 TB Hard Drive - 3.5" Internal - SATA (SATA/600) HAT5300-12T | 12TB | CMR | 465 | Link |
What is the cost of 8TB drive?
The price of the cheapest drive is $235 [US]
What is the cost of 12TB drive?
The price of the cheapest drive is $464.55 [US]
How much can 8TB hold?
8TB can hold around
2666667 MP3 songs
OR 1600000 5MB Photos
OR 533333 FLAC audio files
OR 11429 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 941 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 160 Blu-ray
OR 8 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
How much can 12TB hold?
12TB can hold around
4000000 MP3 songs
OR 2400000 5MB Photos
OR 800000 FLAC audio files
OR 17143 HD Movies or Audio CDs
OR 1412 4K Movies or DVDs
OR 240 Blu-ray
OR 12 Surveillance cameras (30 days)
Actual size of 8TB drive?
8TB HDD can have around 7.451 TB usable storage space
Actual size of 12TB drive?
12TB HDD can have around 11.176 TB usable storage space
How do I find the actual hard drive size?
The hard drive capacity calculation method of the Manufacturer is: 120GB=120,000MB=120,000,000KB=120,000,000,000 bytes; while the hard drive capacity calculation method of is: 120,000,000,000 bytes/1024=117,187,500KB/1024=114, 440.9MB/1024=111.8GB.
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