How to Choose the BEST Value Hard Drive and Best Price per TB – Get it Right, FIRST TIME!

Rob Andrews

3 years ago

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

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.