How Much Does a Hard Drive Cost?

How much does a hard drive cost today?

Mostly, it comes down to capacity. A 2TB drive and a 12TB drive sit in different price brackets, and within one size the drive's class and condition move the price too. A fixed price range goes stale quickly, so the table below shows today's prices for new internal hard drives at each common size, taken from the current snapshot of live Amazon listings.

Typical price is the median of the new single-drive offers at that size: the middle of the market, not a deal. Lowest price is the single cheapest offer right now, with its price per TB beside it. Every figure carries its capture time, because prices can change at any time.

To see every offer at every size, sorted by price per TB, use the internal hard drive rankings.

What makes one hard drive cost more than another

Capacity comes first. Bigger drives cost more in total, so compare them by price per TB rather than sticker price: a drive that costs more up front can still cost less for each terabyte. Which size gives the lowest price per TB varies from offer to offer, so check the table.

The drive's class matters next. Desktop drives, such as Seagate's BarraCuda line, are made for PCs. NAS drives are built for 24x7 operation in multi-bay systems: WD Red Plus is designed for RAID-optimized NAS systems with up to 8 bays, is rated for 180TB a year of workload and has a 3-year limited warranty, while Seagate IronWolf uses CMR recording, supports workloads of up to 180TB a year and includes three years of Rescue Data Recovery Services. NAS and enterprise drives are usually rated for heavier workloads and carry longer warranties than desktop drives. The NAS hard drive rankings cover drives built for always-on use.

Then there's condition: drives are sold new, renewed or used. Amazon Renewed products come with the Amazon Renewed Guarantee, which lets you return the item within 90 days of receipt (1 year for Renewed Premium) for a full refund or a replacement. A renewed drive isn't automatically the better deal, so compare its price per TB with new drives of the same size. The refurbished hard drive rankings list renewed, recertified and used offers.

An external drive is a hard drive in an enclosure with a USB connection. Whether an external or an internal drive works out cheaper per TB depends on the offers at the time, so check the external drive rankings as well.

SSDs cost more per TB than hard drives. Whether the extra speed is worth it depends on the job: see SSD vs HDD for gaming and external SSD vs HDD.

Price per TB and price per GB

Price per TB is the fairest way to compare drives of different sizes: divide the price by the capacity in TB. For price per GB, divide the price per TB by 1,000, since drive makers count a TB as 1,000 GB.

The price per TB calculator does the sum for a drive you found elsewhere and shows how it compares with typical prices for its size. The live table on the home page ranks every tracked drive by price per TB.

Backblaze, which runs more than 340,000 hard drives, says in its 2025 Drive Stats report that cost per gigabyte has declined steadily over the years, and that this is one reason its fleet keeps shifting toward higher-capacity drives.

What a hard drive replacement costs

The drive is the part this page tracks. In most desktop PCs, fitting it takes a few screws and two cables: Seagate's instructions for its BarraCuda drives are to mount the drive in a 3.5-inch bay, connect the SATA data cable to the motherboard and the SATA power cable from the power supply, then format the drive in the operating system.

If a shop does the work, labour, data migration (copying your files to the new drive) and data recovery (rescuing files from a failed one) cost extra, and the price varies by shop and job. We don't track those costs.

Laptops are different. They usually take 2.5-inch drives, and many newer laptops take an M.2 SSD instead of a hard drive, so check what your machine accepts before you buy. If you're not sure which type you need, the drive picker asks three questions and suggests one.

How to get a good price

For the lowest price per TB across every size, new and renewed, start with the cheapest hard drives. Then:

• Compare by price per TB, not sticker price.
• Check the deal score in the live table. It compares an offer with typical pricing for its size and condition (how we rank deals).
• Pick the class that fits the job: a desktop drive for a PC, a NAS drive for an always-on NAS.
• For renewed drives, note the return window: 90 days under the Amazon Renewed Guarantee, or 1 year for Renewed Premium.
• Keep backups of anything important, whichever drive you buy.