Stop overpaying for storage.

Price per terabyte ($/TB) divides a drive’s price by its capacity in terabytes, giving you the true cost of storage regardless of headline price. A $200 4TB drive ($50/TB) is cheaper storage than a $120 2TB drive ($60/TB). It’s the single most useful number for comparing drives of different sizes — which is why every product here is ranked by it.

For raw capacity, hard drives remain far cheaper — typically $15–$25 per terabyte versus $70+ per terabyte for SSDs. Use HDDs for archives, backups, media libraries and NAS bulk pools. Use SSDs and NVMe where speed matters: operating systems, applications, games, editing scratch disks and databases. Most people end up with both: a fast SSD boot drive and a high-capacity HDD for everything else.

Used enterprise SAS and SATA drives often offer the lowest cost per terabyte available, but buy with care: check the seller’s return policy, confirm SMART health on arrival, and never rely on a single copy. With a sound 3-2-1 backup strategy — three copies, two media types, one off-site — used drives are a reasonable choice for secondary and archival tiers.

CMR (conventional magnetic recording) writes non-overlapping tracks and handles sustained random writes well, making it the safer choice for NAS and RAID. SMR (shingled magnetic recording) overlaps tracks for higher density and lower cost, but can slow dramatically during heavy sustained writes and array rebuilds. Prefer CMR for NAS, RAID and write-heavy work; SMR is fine for cold archival storage. Our CMR vs SMR guide lists how to identify each.

LTO tape cartridges store enormous capacity per cartridge (18TB native on LTO-9) with no electronics inside the media, so the per-terabyte cost is unmatched for cold, long-term archives. The catch is the drive: an LTO drive is a significant up-front cost, and tape is slow for random access. It only makes sense at scale or for archival data you rarely read back. See our LTO tape backup guide.