Current hard drive costs at a glance with links to purchase from Amazon. I recommend Seagate hard drives because they continue to test as some of the longest lasting drives at backblaze.com.
Highlights for January include a minor price increase on 6Tb and 10TB external drives, as well as slight changes to internal drives as noted. The days of storage prices dropping quickly seem to be over as drive capacities become so large. Also of note is that 2Tb external drives are now all “portable” meaning they are 2.5″ laptop drives that are bus powered. For my main storage I prefer to have external 3.5″ drives that are plugged in to an external power source, so that means buying a 4TB drive or larger.
10TB external drives are still a big savings over 10TB Internal drives. Also, on a cost per TB basis, 10TB drives are getting close enough to the sweet spot of pricing to make them attractive if you need that kind of storage. But I generally don’t recommend buying more than a year’s capacity at a time to protect from price changes. Also remember that a properly backed up “storage set” requires three drives, so buying more than you reasonably need (over provisioning) can suck up a lot of money.
Sometimes external drives are less expensive than internal drives. Advanced users may want to explore “shucking” external drives to save money as the external drives are often, but not always, SATA drives that can be used as an internal drive.
EXTERNAL
2TB $59.99 ($30 per TB) 2.5″ USB powered portable drive
4TB $89.99 ($22.50 per TB)
6TB $109.99 ($18.33 per TB) +$10Change
8TB $139.99 ($17.50 per TB)
10TB $199.99 ($20 per TB)+$20 Change
INTERNAL
2TB $49.99 ($25 per TB)
4TB $79.99 ($19.99 per TB)-$10 Change
6TB $131.99 ($22 per TB)
8TB $149.99 ($18.75 per TB)
10TB $252.98 ($25.29 per TB)+$12 Change
12TB $327 ($27.25 per TB)+$15 Change
14TB $439.99 ($31.40 per TB)
16TB $484.99 ($30.31 per TB)+$6 Change
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