What's the Cheapest High Capacity HDD With the Best Value?

Sourced from real discussions on r/DataHoarder and r/homelab, cross-checked against live PricePerGig listings.

Drives with a SAS interface, used from a data centre, are almost always the best value option, just not the simplest to use. Following that, the best value hard drive is usually the largest drive that was released about a year ago! That’s quite challenging to know when you only buy a drive every now and then, so use PricePerGig.com: order by price per GB or TB and browse down the list. This is exactly the question this whole website was built to answer.

As you browse, you’ll notice drives that say they have a SAS interface (when you were expecting the SATA you’re familiar with), or drives that say ‘refurbished from a server’, and quite rightly start to wonder what these are and how to use them. The table above puts the two side by side, SATA first because that’s what most people want, then SAS, both at 8TB and up and sorted by price per TB, so the value gap shows itself. Let me explain the bargains hiding in plain sight.

Used SAS drives: the cheapest terabytes there are

Used SAS drives, pulled from old servers and data centres, are the cheapest terabytes you can buy. And there is nothing wrong with them. They have led a pampered life in a nice air-conditioned rack, with all their friends a polite distance away and fresh cool air whizzing by constantly. That is a gentler existence than most consumer drives ever get.

The catch is that SAS comes with a few complexities. They can be noisier, they often draw more power, and crucially your PC needs a new type of adapter to talk to them, an inexpensive HBA card rather than the usual SATA port. None of that is hard, but it is a step beyond plugging in a normal drive, which is exactly why these drives stay cheap while the rest of us sleep on them.

The shucking trick: a drive in a USB box can be cheaper than the bare one

Here is a genuinely bizarre one. A hard drive sealed inside a plastic USB enclosure is often cheaper than the equivalent bare drive of the same size.

Why? Because the manufacturer is selling you a capacity, not a specific drive. That gives them flexibility to put whatever they have spare in the box. Overstock of 12TB WD Purple CCTV drives? Re-flash the firmware so they are no longer tied to surveillance gear, drop them in a plastic case, and ship them out. Problem solved for the manufacturer, cheaper drive for you.

Cracking open one of those enclosures and putting the bare drive straight into your PC is known as shucking, and it is one of the reliable ways to beat the bare-drive price.

Least effort: just browse the list

If all of that sounds like effort, here is the lazy, effective approach: just browse down the live list on PricePerGig.com, sorted by price per TB.

You’ll inevitably find used drives near the top of the value pile. When you do, it is worth a few minutes to learn how to make sure a used drive is practically as good as a new one, reading its SMART data, burning it in, and checking the numbers stay stable.

A word on the family jewels (the family photos)

There is one situation where I would not chase the cheapest used drive: the family jewels, aka the irreplaceable family photos.

If you are only going to have a single drive, then yes, spend a little more and buy new. It is simpler and more likely to keep those photos and other critical data intact. And whatever you do, I would always recommend a simple backup solution on top. One copy is never a backup, no matter how new the drive.

Best value is always a price per TB game

Forget the headline price for a second.

The number that matters is price per TB. A 20TB drive that costs more up front can easily be cheaper per terabyte than an 8TB one. Big drives spread the fixed cost of the motor, casing and controller across more storage.

And the sweet spot moves. As new larger drives launch, the best value point drifts upward, and the newest, biggest drive on the market often carries an early adopter tax. Drop one or two capacity steps down from the very top and the price per TB usually improves a lot, which is why “the largest drive from about a year ago” is such a reliable rule of thumb. Trust the live table, not a forum post from 2022.

Brands worth trusting

When you do buy new, here are the big three I would buy a large drive from.

• Western Digital: the Red Plus and Red Pro for NAS, the Gold and Ultrastar for enterprise grade.
• Seagate: the IronWolf range for NAS, the Exos line for high capacity enterprise value.
• Toshiba: the N300 for NAS and the MG series for enterprise, often the quiet bargain of the three.

For big drives, make sure you are buying a CMR NAS or enterprise model rather than a cheap SMR desktop one (worth checking on shucked drives especially). All three brands are solid, so let the live price per TB pick the winner.

The bottom line

The cheapest high capacity HDD with the best value is whatever sits lowest on the live price per TB table for your marketplace: often a used SAS enterprise drive, sometimes a shucked USB unit, and otherwise a big drive a notch below the newest one.

Set the marketplace selector up top to your country, glance at the table, and buy with confidence. No guesswork required.

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