Amazon now sells its cheapest new CMR terabyte inside a WD Blue 8TB desktop drive, at $38.75, not inside a NAS drive. NAS drives start at about $44.50 per TB from Amazon. A WD Red Plus 12TB that B&H sold for $199.99 on Black Friday 2025 now costs $533.81. Hard drive prices have not come back down, and the per-TB gap between drive classes is narrower than the old rules of thumb say.
We track NAS, surveillance, desktop and enterprise HDD prices: 49 new listings on Amazon US across WD, Seagate and Toshiba. Each row carries its cost per TB, its recording technology (CMR or SMR) and a verdict against the cheapest CMR drive in its class. Every price below was checked against the Amazon catalog (pulled October 31, 2026 through the Amazon Creators API). The page follows the same update cadence as our SSD price tracker and GPU price tracker.
Hard drive prices per TB right now
For each class, the table gives the cheapest CMR terabyte from any seller, the cheapest one Amazon.com sells itself, and the cheapest SMR listing for comparison. A drive sold by Amazon.com costs $1.25 to $15.52 more per TB here. In return, returns and warranty claims go through Amazon instead of a marketplace seller you have never heard of.
| Class | Cheapest CMR per TB | Cheapest CMR sold by Amazon.com | Cheapest SMR per TB |
|---|---|---|---|
| NAS | Toshiba N300 22TB: $37.77 | WD Red Plus 12TB: $44.48 | WD Red 6TB (plain): $68.32 |
| Surveillance | Seagate SkyHawk 4TB: $40.00 | None in stock | Toshiba S300 4TB: $68.00 |
| Desktop | Toshiba X300 20TB: $37.50 | WD Blue 8TB: $38.75 | Seagate BarraCuda 8TB: $31.25 |
| Enterprise | Toshiba MG04 6TB: $31.67 | WD Gold 16TB: $47.19 | None listed |
Read across the rows and three patterns show up:
- Classes overlap: a surveillance SkyHawk, a desktop WD Blue and a NAS-rated N300 Pro all land between $38 and $40 per TB, so the label on the drive no longer predicts the price.
- Amazon stocks WD only: Amazon.com had no Seagate or Toshiba internal drive in stock under its own name in this pull, so every Seagate and Toshiba row came from another seller.
- Cheapest is SMR: the lowest internal price per TB belongs to an SMR BarraCuda, the one drive class we would keep out of a RAID array.
Outside the table, the Seagate Expansion 24TB external USB drive cost $679.99, or $28.33 per TB, and Amazon.com sold the WD Elements 26TB for $43.28 per TB. Shucking an external is still the cheapest way to a new terabyte, but the drive inside, and whether it is CMR, varies by batch, which our shucking guide covers drive by drive.
Best hard drive buys this week
Three drives lead on price per TB from a seller we would buy from today. Each one is CMR, each one is new, and two of the three are sold and shipped by Amazon.com. Pick by the box the drive goes into, not by the colour of the label.
Cheapest CMR terabyte from Amazon: WD Blue 8TB
At $309.99 from Amazon.com, the WD Blue 8TB (WD80EAAZ) works out to $38.75 per TB. WD lists it as a 5640 RPM CMR drive with a 256 MB cache, so it is not one of the SMR WD Blue models (the EZAZ and EZBX suffixes). As a single drive it suits a backup target, a Proxmox Backup Server datastore or a media disk in a desktop.
Its limits are on paper. WD Blue carries a 2-year warranty against 3 years for WD Red Plus, and WD rates it for desktops, not for 24/7 multi-bay NAS duty. Amazon sells the Red Plus 12TB, its cheapest NAS-rated terabyte, at $44.48 per TB. So the NAS rating and the extra warranty year cost about $6 per TB on top. For a single disk that powers down at night, that premium buys little. For anything in a RAID array, use the NAS-rated drives instead.
Five-year warranty for $6 more: WD Red Pro 12TB
Amazon.com sells the WD Red Pro 12TB (WD122KFBX) for $539.99, $45.00 per TB. A WD Red Plus 12TB costs $533.81, so the Pro is $6.18 more. For that, WD rates the drive at 550 TB per year of workload instead of 180, with a 5-year warranty instead of 3. On a 4-bay or 6-bay NAS that is about $25 to $37 extra for the whole array.
On September 27 the Red Plus 12TB sold for $459.99, which is $80 less than the Red Pro costs now. If you already own Red Plus drives and only need one more for an existing pool, match what you have. For a new 4-bay NAS build, the Red Pro is the 12TB we would buy at these prices.
Cheapest high-capacity NAS terabyte: Toshiba N300 Pro 20TB
Newegg Business sells the Toshiba N300 Pro 20TB (HDWG82AXZSTB) through Amazon for $766.99, $38.35 per TB. No NAS-rated terabyte above 12TB costs less from a seller with a known name. It undercuts the Seagate IronWolf Pro 20TB and the WD Red Pro 20TB by $5.65 to $6.26 per TB. Toshiba rates the N300 Pro at 550 TB per year, up to 24 bays and a 5-year warranty, which puts it in the same class as those two drives.
Per drive it saves $113 against the IronWolf Pro 20TB and $125 against the Red Pro 20TB, or $450 to $500 on a 4-bay Synology or TrueNAS box. Check the compatibility list first if your NAS vendor enforces one, because a drive the NAS refuses to pool costs more than the money it saves.
NAS hard drive prices: WD Red, IronWolf and N300
In this set the cheapest CMR NAS terabyte costs $37.77, and every verdict below measures a drive against that number. Good is within 10% of it, Fair is up to 25% over, and Overpriced is more than 25% over. We kept the plain WD Red row on purpose: it is an SMR drive sold under a NAS name, and at $68.32 per TB it is also the worst value on the page.
| Drive | Recording | Price | Per TB | Sold by | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Toshiba N300 22TB | CMR | $831.00 | $37.77 | Third-party seller | Good |
| Toshiba N300 Pro 20TB | CMR | $766.99 | $38.35 | Newegg Business | Good |
| WD Red Pro 18TB (WD181KFGX) | CMR | $752.99 | $41.83 | Third-party seller | Fair |
| WD Red Pro 16TB (WD161KFGX) | CMR | $679.99 | $42.50 | Third-party seller | Fair |
| Seagate IronWolf Pro 16TB (ST16000NE000) | CMR | $699.44 | $43.72 | Third-party seller | Fair |
| Seagate IronWolf Pro 32TB (ST32000NT000) | CMR (HAMR) | $1,399.99 | $43.75 | Third-party seller | Fair |
| Seagate IronWolf Pro 28TB (ST28000NT000) | CMR (HAMR) | $1,229.99 | $43.93 | Third-party seller | Fair |
| Seagate IronWolf Pro 20TB (ST20000NT001) | CMR | $879.99 | $44.00 | Third-party seller | Fair |
| Seagate IronWolf Pro 24TB (ST24000NT002) | CMR | $1,059.99 | $44.17 | Third-party seller | Fair |
| WD Red Plus 12TB (WD120EFGX) | CMR | $533.81 | $44.48 | Amazon.com | Fair |
| WD Red Pro 20TB (WD202KFGX) | CMR | $892.26 | $44.61 | Amazon.com | Fair |
| WD Red Pro 12TB (WD122KFBX) | CMR | $539.99 | $45.00 | Amazon.com | Fair |
| WD Red Plus 10TB (WD100EFGX) | CMR | $459.99 | $46.00 | Amazon.com | Fair |
| Seagate IronWolf 10TB (ST10000VN000) | CMR | $459.99 | $46.00 | Third-party seller | Fair |
| WD Red Plus 6TB (WD60EFPX) | CMR | $299.99 | $50.00 | Adorama | Overpriced |
| WD Red Pro 24TB (WD241KFGX) | CMR | $1,311.83 | $54.66 | Amazon.com | Overpriced |
| Toshiba N300 10TB (HDWG71AXZSTA) | CMR | $549.00 | $54.90 | Third-party seller | Overpriced |
| WD Red 6TB (plain) (WD60EFAX) | SMR | $409.90 | $68.32 | Third-party seller | Skip for RAID (SMR) |
Price per TB falls as capacity rises to about 18TB, then flattens. Every IronWolf Pro from 20TB to 32TB lands between $43.75 and $44.17 per TB, so a 32TB drive costs no more per terabyte than a 20TB one. For big drives the deciding number is the rebuild. A 32TB disk takes longer to resilver than a 20TB one, and in a 4-bay RAIDZ1 or RAID 5 that window is when a second failure loses the pool.
At $37.77 per TB the Toshiba N300 22TB is the cheapest NAS row, but its seller is a marketplace storefront with no track record we can check. So the pick above goes to the N300 Pro from Newegg Business, at 58 cents more per TB. For how WD Red Plus, Red Pro and IronWolf differ beyond price, the NAS hard drive guide compares workload ratings, noise and warranty side by side.
Surveillance hard drive prices: WD Purple, SkyHawk and S300
Surveillance drives are priced like NAS drives this week. Among CMR rows the Seagate SkyHawk 4TB is cheapest at $40.00 per TB, and the large AI-rated drives cluster between $41.87 and $50.00. Amazon.com sold none of these itself on October 31, so every row below comes from a marketplace seller or a camera-system reseller.
| Drive | Recording | Price | Per TB | Sold by | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seagate SkyHawk 4TB (ST4000VX016) | CMR | $159.99 | $40.00 | Third-party seller | Good |
| Seagate SkyHawk AI 32TB | CMR (HAMR) | $1,339.99 | $41.87 | Third-party seller | Good |
| Seagate SkyHawk AI 16TB | CMR | $729.99 | $45.62 | Third-party seller | Fair |
| Seagate SkyHawk 6TB (ST6000VX001) | CMR | $275.00 | $45.83 | Third-party seller | Fair |
| Toshiba S300 AI 16TB (HDWTB1GXZSTA) | CMR | $759.99 | $47.50 | Adorama | Fair |
| WD Purple Pro 22TB (WD221PURP) | CMR | $1,099.00 | $49.95 | Third-party seller | Fair |
| Seagate SkyHawk AI 12TB | CMR | $599.99 | $50.00 | Adorama | Fair |
| WD Purple Pro 14TB (WD142PURP) | CMR | $749.00 | $53.50 | Third-party seller | Overpriced |
| WD Purple 4TB (WD43PURZ) | CMR | $232.00 | $58.00 | Third-party seller | Overpriced |
| Toshiba S300 4TB (HDWT840UZSVA) | SMR | $272.00 | $68.00 | Third-party seller | Skip for RAID (SMR) |
Small NVRs are where the cheapest surveillance terabyte lives. Four cameras recording continuously at 4 Mbps each write about 173 GB a day, so the 4TB SkyHawk at $159.99 holds roughly 23 days, and it costs less per TB than any 4TB NAS or desktop drive in this tracker. Toshiba lists its S300 4TB as SMR on its own lineup page, so that row carries the SMR flag even though a surveillance write pattern is mostly sequential.
Sizing a drive for retention is a separate question from price. The surveillance drive guide works through camera count, bitrate and retention days for Frigate, Blue Iris and UniFi Protect.
Desktop hard drive prices: WD Blue, BarraCuda and X300
Desktop drives hold both the cheapest CMR terabyte Amazon sells ($38.75, the WD Blue 8TB) and the cheapest internal terabyte on the page, the SMR BarraCuda 8TB at $31.25. Every WD Blue that Amazon.com sells this week is a CMR model, which was not true of the WD Blue line a few years ago, so the model number matters more than the brand.
| Drive | Recording | Price | Per TB | Sold by | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Toshiba X300 20TB (HDWR62AXZSTA) | CMR | $749.99 | $37.50 | Third-party seller | Good |
| WD Blue 8TB (WD80EAAZ) | CMR | $309.99 | $38.75 | Amazon.com | Good |
| WD Blue 10TB (WD100EAGZ) | CMR | $419.99 | $42.00 | Amazon.com | Fair |
| WD Blue 12TB (WD120EAGZ) | CMR | $504.99 | $42.08 | Amazon.com | Fair |
| Toshiba X300 Pro 14TB | CMR | $589.99 | $42.14 | Adorama | Fair |
| WD Blue 4TB (WD40EZZX) | CMR | $179.99 | $45.00 | Amazon.com | Fair |
| Seagate BarraCuda 24TB (ST24000DM001) | CMR | $1,099.95 | $45.83 | Third-party seller | Fair |
| WD_BLACK 10TB (WD102FZBX) | CMR | $478.00 | $47.80 | Third-party seller | Overpriced |
| Seagate BarraCuda 8TB (ST8000DM004) | SMR | $249.99 | $31.25 | Third-party seller | Skip for RAID (SMR) |
| WD Blue 6TB (WD60EZAZ) | SMR | $340.00 | $56.67 | Third-party seller | Skip for RAID (SMR) |
SMR is worth $7.50 per TB here, the gap between the BarraCuda 8TB and the WD Blue 8TB. For a single drive that holds games or a media library and is written once, that gap is real money saved. For a drive that will sit in a mirror or a parity array, it is a false saving, because an SMR drive can take far longer to rebuild or drop out of the array.
At $37.50 per TB the Toshiba X300 20TB is the cheapest CMR desktop terabyte overall, but its 2-year warranty and 55 TB per year rating are desktop numbers. Toshiba sells the X300 Pro as a different drive with a 300 TB per year rating and 5 years of warranty, and it costs $42.14 per TB at 14TB.
Enterprise drive prices: Exos, WD Gold, Ultrastar and MG
Enterprise drives used to be the per-TB floor for homelabs, and at $31.67 the Toshiba MG04 6TB is still the cheapest CMR terabyte on this page. Age and seller are the catch: the MG04 is an older generation, and almost every enterprise row below comes from a reseller rather than Amazon.com.
| Drive | Recording | Price | Per TB | Sold by | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Toshiba MG04 6TB (MG04ACA600E) | CMR | $189.99 | $31.67 | Third-party seller | Good |
| Seagate Exos 12TB | CMR | $459.00 | $38.25 | Third-party seller | Fair |
| Toshiba MG07 14TB (MG07ACA14TE) | CMR | $539.99 | $38.57 | Third-party seller | Fair |
| Toshiba MG10 22TB (MG10AFA22TE) | CMR | $937.00 | $42.59 | Third-party seller | Overpriced |
| Seagate Exos X20 18TB (ST18000NM003D) | CMR | $792.00 | $44.00 | Third-party seller | Overpriced |
| WD Ultrastar DC HC550 16TB (WUH721816ALE6L4) | CMR | $744.45 | $46.53 | Third-party seller | Overpriced |
| WD Gold 16TB | CMR | $754.99 | $47.19 | Amazon.com | Overpriced |
| Seagate Exos M 28TB (ST28000NM003K) | CMR (HAMR) | $1,343.24 | $47.97 | Third-party seller | Overpriced |
| WD Gold 12TB | CMR | $594.99 | $49.58 | Amazon.com | Overpriced |
| WD Gold 24TB | CMR | $1,278.50 | $53.27 | Amazon.com | Overpriced |
| Seagate Exos X24 24TB (ST24000NM001H) | CMR | $1,364.45 | $56.85 | Third-party seller | Overpriced |
WD Gold is the exception. Amazon.com sells the 12TB, 16TB and 24TB itself, at $47.19 to $53.27 per TB, which is $3 to $9 per TB over the cheapest NAS drive Amazon sells. Read the warranty terms on any reseller enterprise listing before buying, because the price does not tell you who backs the drive.
Recertified enterprise drives are the other route. Our recertified drive test found Exos and Ultrastar drives at roughly $29 to $34 per TB in October, with shorter warranties and a burn-in test you should run before trusting one.
SMR drives in the tracker and why they are flagged
Shingled magnetic recording (SMR) overlaps tracks to fit more data per platter, then rewrites whole bands when you change a block. For a single drive that mostly reads, you will rarely notice it. A ZFS resilver or any long burst of writes fills the fast cache area on the drive. It then has to rewrite whole bands before it accepts more data, and that is when SMR drives slow to a crawl or time out of an array. Four SMR listings made the tables:
- WD Red 6TB (plain) (WD60EFAX): $68.32 per TB. Sold as a NAS drive, SMR per the WD product brief. Buy Red Plus instead at a lower price per TB.
- Toshiba S300 4TB (HDWT840UZSVA): $68.00 per TB. Toshiba lists the S300 2TB, 4TB and 6TB as drive-managed SMR. The S300 AI line is CMR.
- WD Blue 6TB (WD60EZAZ): $56.67 per TB. WD sells a CMR 6TB Blue as WD60EZAX; the EZAZ suffix marks the SMR one.
- Seagate BarraCuda 8TB (ST8000DM004): $31.25 per TB. The Seagate CMR/SMR list puts the 4TB and 8TB BarraCuda on SMR and 12TB and up on CMR.
Every manufacturer now publishes the split. Seagate keeps a CMR and SMR list by product line and capacity, and WD prints the recording technology in each product brief. When a listing does not show the model number, ask the seller for it before you buy a drive for an array.
How hard drive prices moved since Black Friday 2025
Each row is one Amazon listing, read on the dates we refreshed our NAS drive guide. Where B&H published a Black Friday 2025 price for the same model number, it sits in the first column. A dash means no price was logged that day, either because the listing was out of stock or because we did not read it.
| Drive | Black Friday 2025 | Sep 27 | Oct 10 | Oct 18 | Oct 24 | Oct 31 | Since Sep 27 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WD Red Plus 10TB (WD100EFGX) | $169.99 | $404.99 | $455.75 | $455.75 | $459.99 | $459.99 | +14% |
| WD Red Plus 12TB (WD120EFGX) | $199.99 | $459.99 | – | – | – | $533.81 | +16% |
| WD Red Pro 16TB (WD161KFGX) | – | $670.00 | $714.99 | $718.48 | $714.99 | $679.99 | +1% |
| WD Red Pro 22TB (WD221KFGX) | – | $958.90 | $958.88 | $961.70 | $981.88 | $1,123.01 | +17% |
| Seagate IronWolf Pro 20TB (ST20000NT001) | – | – | $829.99 | $879.99 | $879.99 | $879.99 | – |
| Seagate IronWolf Pro 24TB (ST24000NT002) | – | $859.99 | – | $1,059.99 | $1,059.99 | $1,059.99 | +23% |
All five drives with a September 27 price cost more today: four by 14% to 23%, and the Red Pro 16TB by 1% after it moved to a marketplace seller. Against Black Friday 2025 the jump is larger: the WD Red Plus 10TB went from $169.99 to $459.99 and the 12TB from $199.99 to $533.81, a factor of 2.7 on both. B&H sold the WD Red Pro 18TB for $299.99 then; a marketplace seller asks $752.99 now.
None of this is a retail blip. In January, Tom’s Hardware reported a ComputerBase finding that 12 popular drives rose an average of 46% in four months in Europe. On their earnings calls, WD said it was largely sold out for 2026 and Seagate said its nearline capacity was fully allocated through the year, mostly to cloud and AI buyers (The Register). Our storage price explainer covers the supply side in more detail.
How the prices were measured
All 49 rows come from one pull of the Amazon US catalog on October 31, 2026. The rules below decide what made it into a table:
- Source: Amazon Creators API search across 23 drive families and 62 capacity queries, recording price, seller and stock state for every listing.
- Condition: new only. Renewed, recertified, used, open-box and bundle listings were dropped, as were SAS drives.
- Stock: only listings marked in stock or low stock count. Listings that ship at a later date were left out.
- Per TB: the listed price divided by the marketed capacity in decimal terabytes, before tax and shipping.
- Recording: CMR or SMR from WD product briefs, the Seagate CMR/SMR list and Toshiba product pages, matched by model number where the listing names one.
- Verdict: each drive against the cheapest CMR row in its own class, so a surveillance drive is judged against surveillance drives.
Amazon prices change several times a day, and marketplace sellers change faster. Treat every table as a dated snapshot. The buttons and price links open the live listing, which is the price you will pay.
What to watch before Black Friday
Each target below is the lowest price we logged for that drive since late September. A Black Friday price at or under the target is a real deal by 2026 standards; anything above it is the current price with a banner on it.
- WD Red Plus 10TB: buy at $405 or less ($40.50 per TB). It is $459.99 today.
- WD Red Plus 12TB: buy at $460 or less ($38.33 per TB). It is $533.81 today.
- WD Red Pro 16TB: buy at $670 or less ($41.88 per TB). It is $679.99 today from a marketplace seller.
- Seagate IronWolf Pro 20TB: buy at $830 or less ($41.50 per TB). It is $879.99 today.
- Seagate IronWolf Pro 24TB: buy at $860 or less ($35.83 per TB). It is $1,059.99 today.
Do not wait for Black Friday 2025 prices to return. WD called itself largely sold out for 2026 and Seagate’s nearline capacity is allocated through the year, so a $17 per TB doorbuster like the 2025 Red Plus 12TB deal is unlikely this year. If a drive you need is under its target today, buy it. If your array has spare capacity for another month, keep the drive list from the 2-bay NAS guide or the 4-bay one handy, and check this page again after the November pull.
