Storage explainers and market updates
Short, sourced answers to the questions that decide which drive to buy, plus where storage prices are heading.
Explainers
- How Much Does a Hard Drive Cost?
It depends mostly on capacity, then on the drive's class and condition; the live table on this page shows today's typical and lowest prices for new internal hard drives at each common size.
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- CMR vs SMR: What It Means for Your NAS
Get a CMR drive for a NAS, RAID array, or anything with heavy or continuous writes; SMR drives are fine for write-once storage like backups and archives, but they slow drastically during rebuilds.
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- SSD vs HDD for a NAS: Why Hard Drives Still Win at Home
For most home NAS boxes on gigabit networking, hard drives are the right bulk storage: the network caps transfers around 116 to 118 MB/s, one NAS hard drive can outrun that, and SSDs cost far more per TB. Use SSDs as cache, or all-flash with 10GbE.
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- NAS vs External Hard Drive: Which Should You Buy?
Get an external hard drive for extra storage or backups for one computer; get a NAS when several devices need shared, always-on storage with redundancy — and use an external drive as a backup target either way.
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- PS5 SSD Upgrade: Which Drive to Buy and How to Install It
A PS5 storage upgrade means either an internal PCIe Gen4 M.2 SSD, which plays PS5 games directly, or a USB drive, which stores PS5 games but plays only PS4 games — pick by what you play, then follow Sony's install steps.
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- External SSD vs External Hard Drive: Which One Do You Need?
An external SSD is faster, smaller, and tougher; an external hard drive is cheaper per TB and holds more. Use an SSD for working files, travel, and games, and a hard drive for bulk backups and archives — many people should own one of each.
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- NVMe vs SATA SSD: Which One Do You Actually Need?
NVMe drives are several times faster than SATA on paper, but in everyday use and older games the gap is small; the real reasons to choose NVMe are newer games built for fast storage and a PC with an NVMe-capable M.2 slot.
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- SSD vs HDD for Gaming: Load Times, FPS, and What to Buy
An SSD is close to required for modern PC gaming — several big games list one in their minimum specs — but it mostly cuts load times and pop-in rather than raising average frame rates. Play from an NVMe SSD; keep a hard drive for storage.
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- How Hard Disk Prices Ranks Drives and Deal Scores
Every ranking on Hard Disk Prices comes from two checkable rules, price per TB and a 0 to 100 deal score against comparable offers in today's snapshot, and no brand or seller pays for placement.
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Market updates
- Are SSD Prices Going Up? Why, and When They May Drop
Barely — as of November 2026, price increases for consumer SSDs have nearly stopped and NAND spot prices are falling, but enterprise SSDs are still rising fast on AI demand, and no real price drop has started yet.
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