Every listing on PricePerGig has a Value Score — an icon that tells you how good a deal it is compared to similar drives in the same shopping zone. Higher is better. An Exceptional score means you’re looking at a genuinely rare deal. A score of Poor means you’re almost certainly overpaying.

Most storage comparison sites sort by price per TB and call it a day. Price per TB tells you what something costs. Value Score tells you whether that cost is actually good — and that difference matters more than ever as drive prices shift, options multiply, and what you really want is great value, not necessarily the cheapest option.

Value Score is not a price comparison score — it determines the true value of the item.

Here’s an example. A 16TB hard drive at $20/TB might look expensive next to an 8TB drive at $17/TB. But if that 16TB drive is enterprise-grade with a 5-year warranty, CMR recording technology, and every comparable drive is listed at $24/TB or higher, the 16TB is the far better deal. Value Score catches this. Simple price-per-TB sorting does not.

Why I Built This

I’ve been in software development for over 20 years, and I’ve spent the last five focused on machine learning. I built Value Score because I kept finding myself doing the same mental maths manually — opening multiple tabs, cross-referencing specs, warranty, condition, marketplace — trying to work out whether a price was actually good or just looked good. With over 100,000 listing updates flowing through PricePerGig every day, that kind of manual comparison doesn’t scale.

So I built a model to do it automatically, for every listing, across every marketplace, every single day.

The approach came from years of building custom ML models — starting with a simple neural network that taught a virtual car to avoid obstacles on its own. The learning curve was steep, but that foundation is what made Value Score’s feature engineering possible. Seventy-eight features, twelve shopping zones, twenty-four marketplaces — all evaluated continuously.

The Five Tiers

Value Scores are grouped into five tiers so you can spot deals at a glance. Each tier has an icon you’ll see throughout the site.

Exceptional Value

The best deals currently available. These listings are priced significantly below what the model expects for their specs, condition, and marketplace. They’re rare — typically fewer than 5% of all listings at any given time.

Within this tier, there is a hidden tier — what I call glitch-level deals: the price is so far below expectations that it may be a pricing error, a flash sale, or a clearance item about to disappear. I’ve seen drives at this level where the seller has clearly mistyped the price, or a specialist retailer has mistyped the capacity and will likely honour the mistake. If you see one and it fits your needs, act fast — these don’t last.

Exceptional Value listings are the ones I feature in the Daily Top Picks and highlight in the Deal Digest newsletter. Sign up for Deal Digest to get notified as they happen.

Great Value

Solidly good deals. These drives are priced noticeably below average for their category and features. If you’re shopping for storage and a Great Value listing matches your requirements, it’s a strong buy — you’re unlikely to find the same drive meaningfully cheaper elsewhere right now.

Fair Value

The majority of listings fall here, and that’s fine. These drives are priced around what the model considers normal for their technology, capacity, condition, marketplace and other factors. There’s nothing wrong with Fair Value listings — they’re simply not standout deals. If a specific drive is exactly what you need, a Fair Value score shouldn’t stop you buying it. In fact, you should be pleased it’s Fair Value, especially given the current market.

Below Average

These listings are priced above the norm for comparable drives. You might still choose one if it has specific features you need or if it’s the only option at a particular capacity, but it’s worth checking whether a better-priced alternative exists. Sort by Value Score to find out — that’s literally what it’s for.

Poor Value

Significantly overpriced compared to similar drives. Common causes: marketplace sellers adding large markups to scarce models, outdated listings that haven’t been repriced in months, or drives with inflated shipping costs baked into the headline price. These are typically worth avoiding — check back on pricepergig.com and find a better deal for your storage needs.

What Goes Into a Value Score

The score is calculated by a machine learning model that analyses 78 features of every listing. The model learns what “normal” pricing looks like within each shopping zone, and then flags listings that deviate from that norm — in either direction.

Here are some of the things it considers:

• Capacity — a 1TB drive and a 16TB drive have fundamentally different price expectations
• Technology type — SSDs and HDDs are separate markets; NVMe and SATA are priced differently
• Recording method — CMR drives command a premium over SMR drives, and the model knows this. If you’re not sure what CMR and SMR mean, I wrote a whole article about it — including why we can collectively blame Western Digital for making it so confusing
• Condition — new and used drives are evaluated against their own peer groups
• Form factor — an M.2 2230 NVMe stick, an internal 3.5” SATA drive, and a portable external USB drive all have distinct pricing curves (because that’s how computers actually work, not necessarily how manufacturers want to sell storage to you)
• Interface — PCIe, SATA, SAS, and USB each carry different price expectations
• Brand — the model learns brand-level pricing patterns. Enterprise brands like HGST price differently from consumer brands, and the model picks up on this
• Warranty length — a 5-year warranty drive is genuinely worth more than a 1-year warranty drive at the same price. The model accounts for this, and honestly, I think warranty is one of the most underrated factors when people shop for storage
• Marketplace context — eBay listings behave more erratically than Amazon listings; the model adjusts expectations accordingly
• Title and listing text signals — this is one of my favourite parts. The model picks up on keywords like “open box”, “server pull”, “zero hours”, and “renewed” that shift the expected price for a listing. A “server pull” drive with zero hours on the clock at a used price? That’s the kind of hidden gem the model was built to find
• Price and price per TB — a heavily weighted signal, but not the only one. There is more to Value Score than price

These features work together to give the model a nuanced understanding of what any given drive should cost — not just what it does cost.

Where Scores Are Calculated — Zones and Marketplaces

The model doesn’t just throw every listing into one big pile and compare them. That would produce nonsense. A £200 drive in the UK (where prices include 20% VAT) and a $200 drive in the US (where tax is excluded) are not the same thing, and comparing them as if they were would produce meaningless scores.

Instead, PricePerGig divides the world into 12 shopping zones across 24 marketplaces, and trains a separate model for each zone. Each zone is defined by currency and market, so a UK listing is only ever compared to other UK listings, a US listing to other US listings. It makes you realise just how big the EU marketplace really is.

The marketplaces are grouped into three tiers:

• Premium marketplaces (like Amazon) tend to have consistent, competitive pricing and strong buyer protection
• P2P marketplaces (like eBay) have more variable pricing — you’ll find both the best bargains and the worst ripoffs here, and the model adjusts its expectations accordingly
• Specialist retailers (like Newegg, Overclockers UK, or alternate.de) often carry enterprise and enthusiast inventory that the mainstream sites don’t stock

The zones span the US, UK, Germany, France, Spain, Canada, Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, Poland, Australia, and a combined Euro Zone aggregate. You can switch between marketplaces using the dropdown at the top of the page, and choose the local eBay or specialist site. Value Scores update to reflect the selected zone automatically.

Why go to all this trouble? Because a good deal on Amazon UK is a completely different thing from a good deal on eBay Australia. If you’re looking at a deal on eBay and want to know whether the seller is charging a fair price, you can just look for the tick, star, or fire icon and just know. The zones keep the scoring honest within each shopping region.

How to Use Value Scores on PricePerGig

Sort by Value Score

Click the VALUE column header in the main table to sort by score. It defaults to best deals first. This is the fastest way to surface deals in any marketplace, capacity range, or drive type. It gives you a completely different view from sorting by price per GB or TB, and you’ll often see drives you’d never have scrolled down to find. I use it myself constantly.

Filter by Value Score

Use the Value Score dropdown in the filter bar to narrow results to a minimum tier. Selecting “Great & Above” hides everything scoring below 65. Here’s my favourite workflow: set your preferred capacity range, pick your technology type and condition, filter to Great Value and above, and you’re left with a short, targeted list of genuinely good deals. No endless scrolling. No overpriced outliers clogging up the results.

On Mobile

On smaller screens where the full VALUE column isn’t shown, the tier icon appears directly next to the price. Tap it for a tooltip explaining what the icon means, turn your phone into landscape mode and then you can sort by value, or just use the filter dropdowns. PricePerGig is mobile-first — always has been — and Value Scores are designed to work just as well on a phone as on a desktop.

How Often Scores Are Updated

Initial Scoring

Value Scores are calculated the moment a listing becomes visible on PricePerGig. You can see how old a listing is by looking at the clock icon on the right-hand side of the row (for mobile users, rotate to landscape to see this). A timestamp like “2h 15m” means that listing and its score were calculated just over two hours ago.

Daily Model Retraining

The model itself is retrained daily on fresh market data, so it adapts to pricing trends. When hard drive prices surged in 2025 due to AI infrastructure demand, the model’s baseline shifted with them. A score of Great Value always means “well below current market expectations,” not “well below where prices were six months ago.”

Why This Matters

Most price tracking tools show you the history of a single product — whether it’s gone up or down over time. That’s useful, but it only tells you half the story. It doesn’t tell you whether that product is a good deal compared to everything else on the market right now. Value Score does. It compares every listing against thousands of others with similar specs, across every marketplace in the same shopping zone, updated daily. That’s not a price history chart — it’s a live, market-wide value assessment.

Tips for Finding the Best Storage Deals

Start with Value Score, not price. Sort by Value Score descending to see the best deals first. You can always check the price afterwards — but leading with value surfaces opportunities you’d miss by scanning prices alone.

Combine filters aggressively. The more specific your filters (technology, capacity, form factor, condition, brand), the more targeted the Value Scores become for your use case. Looking for a NAS drive? Filter to HDD, 8TB+, CMR, SATA, and sort by Value Score. Looking for a Steam Deck SSD? Filter to NVMe, M.2 2230, and sort by Value Score. The filters and the score work together.

Check Exceptional deals quickly. Glitch-level deals can disappear within hours. If you see one and it fits, don’t wait.

Trust the score across marketplaces. Because the model is trained on the entire shopping zone — Amazon, eBay, specialist retailers, all of them — a Great Value score on Amazon already means it’s a good deal compared to what’s available on eBay and everywhere else in that zone. You don’t need to flick between marketplaces and cross-reference prices yourself — the score has already done that for you.

Use the Deal Digest. Sign up for the Deal Digest newsletter and get the highest-scoring new deals delivered to your inbox. It’s the easiest way to catch Exceptional listings without refreshing the site constantly (I know some of you do this — the Deal Digest exists so you don’t have to).

Check the Daily Top Picks. This page surfaces the top-scoring drives per category, updated every 15 minutes. It’s a good starting point if you’re browsing rather than searching for something specific.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does Value Score actually measure?

Value Score measures how far a listing’s price deviates from what the model expects, given 78 features including capacity, technology, condition, warranty, brand, and marketplace tier. A high score, marked with a or icon, means the listing is priced well below the model’s expectation — it’s a better deal than most similar drives currently available across all marketplaces in that shopping zone.

How is Value Score different from just sorting by price per TB?

Price per TB tells you the raw cost of storage. Value Score tells you whether that cost is good in context. A 2TB NVMe SSD at $50/TB might actually be an Exceptional deal if comparable drives are all $65/TB or higher. Meanwhile, an 8TB HDD at $10/TB might be Poor Value if identical drives are available at $7/TB. Value Score accounts for what you’re actually comparing against — including warranty, condition, technology, and marketplace — not just the sticker price divided by terabytes.

Can I trust a Score — is it really a good deal?

The model is trained on thousands of real listings across 24 marketplaces, using 78 features to make its assessment. Value Score measures price relative to the current market — it does not assess seller reputation or return policies. Always verify listing details and buyer protection before purchasing. I do my best to surface the data and prioritise known high-reputation sellers where I can, but I’d never tell you to skip your own due diligence.

Why does the same drive have different scores on different marketplaces?

Because each marketplace belongs to a shopping zone, and each zone has its own independently trained model. An 18TB drive that’s common and competitively priced on Amazon US might be rare and marked up on eBay Australia. The scores reflect local market conditions, not a global average. This is deliberate — comparing UK prices to US prices would produce misleading scores because of VAT, availability, and shipping differences.

How often are scores updated?

Scores are calculated as listings arrive. For some marketplaces, new listings are added constantly throughout the day; others refresh every 6 or 12 hours. The clock icon on each row shows how fresh the data is — e.g., “2h 15m” means this listing and its score were calculated just over two hours ago. The underlying models are retrained daily to stay current with pricing trends across all 12 zones.

Does Value Score factor in shipping costs?

Where shipping cost data is available in the listing, it’s included in the price calculation. For marketplaces like Amazon where Prime/free shipping is standard, the listed price is the effective price. For eBay and other P2P marketplaces, check shipping costs yourself — a high-scoring listing with a hidden £30 shipping fee is less of a deal than it appears. I try to only include items with a fixed shipping cost and always factor that into the calculation. Listings are tagged with Free Shipping and Amazon Prime where I can detect it, which helps.

What’s a “glitch deal”?

A glitch deal is a listing priced so far below expectations that it may be a pricing error, a clearance item, or a flash sale. These are rare and often disappear quickly. Not every glitch deal is a mistake — some are legitimate clearance or overstock pricing. The unusually low price is what earns the extreme score. I’ve been tracking these since before I had a model to find them; now the model does it automatically across every marketplace. The best way to catch them before they sell out is to join the Deal Digest and get notified.

I found a drive with a Score but it’s the only one at this capacity. Is it still worth buying?

Possibly. Value Score compares against the broader market of similar drives. If very few listings exist at that capacity (say, 500GB or 34TB), the model has fewer comparisons and the scores may be less decisive. A poor score in a thin market is a weaker signal than a poor score in a crowded one. Use your judgement, and check whether a nearby capacity (like 1TB or 32TB) might offer better value for your needs.

Does the model know about CMR vs SMR?

Yes. Recording technology is one of the 78 features. The model learns that SMR drives should generally be cheaper than CMR drives of the same capacity, because SMR has performance trade-offs. If an SMR drive is priced like a CMR drive, the model flags it as overpriced. Conversely, if a CMR drive is priced at SMR levels, that’s a great deal and the score reflects it. You can read more about CMR, SMR, and how I tag drives.

The Model Behind the Score

For those interested in the technical side: the Value Score is powered by an autoencoder-based anomaly detection model, trained separately for each of PricePerGig’s 12 shopping zones. The model ingests 78 features per listing — a mix of numerical values (price, capacity, warranty length), categorical flags (technology type, condition, interface, brand, marketplace tier), and text-derived signals extracted using sentence-transformer embeddings from listing titles.

The autoencoder learns the expected price distribution for any combination of features within a zone. It compresses each listing’s feature vector into a lower-dimensional representation and reconstructs it — listings where the reconstructed price diverges significantly from the actual price receive extreme scores. Listings priced below the model’s expectation receive high scores; listings priced above receive low scores. The scoring is relative, not absolute — it reflects the current market, not a historical benchmark.

Each zone’s model is retrained daily on fresh market data. As conditions change — new product launches, tariff changes, supply chain shifts, seasonal sales, or the AI-driven demand surge — the baseline adjusts. This means Value Scores are always grounded in what’s happening right now, not what was happening last quarter.

I don’t publish the full model architecture or the exact weighting (that’s my secret sauce), but I’m transparent about the approach and the inputs: price, capacity, technology, recording method, condition, form factor, interface, brand, warranty, marketplace context, and listing title embeddings. If you have questions about how a specific listing was scored, get in touch — I genuinely want to hear about it. Perhaps you’ve spotted something the model could do better, or you have an idea for additional inputs.

Value Scores are provided as a guide to help you compare storage deals more effectively. They are not financial advice or a guarantee of product quality. Always verify listing details, seller reputation, and return policies before making a purchase. Prices and scores are accurate at the time of calculation and may change between updates.

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