Cost per TB of Storage in 2026: Hard Drives, SSDs, NAS and Cloud
What a terabyte actually costs right now, from live listings, and when buying drives beats paying for the cloud.
By Brandon Sheley · Updated · Prices live as of Oct 30, 2026
Short answer: a hard drive costs about $20.25 per TB right now (typical listing, paid once), an NVMe SSD about $113 per TB, and cloud storage $6.95 to $23 per TB every month. If you'll keep the data more than a few months, drives are far cheaper; the cloud earns its place as your off-site copy.
Most cost-per-TB articles quote a single number that goes stale. The drive prices here come live from my hard drive and SSD price tracker, refreshed every few hours, so they're current whenever you read this.
Cost per TB of Hard Drives and SSDs Right Now
| Drive type | Listings now | Cheapest $/TB | Typical $/TB | Typical $/GB | Sep 2026 typical |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Internal hard drive | 40 | $7.32 | $20.25 | $0.020 | $19.38 |
| External hard drive | 34 | $10.69 | $23.31 | $0.023 | $23.57 |
| SATA SSD | 11 | $78.13 | $92.50 | $0.092 | $92.19 |
| NVMe SSD | 10 | $100.00 | $113 | $0.113 | $110 |
Live from current listings on my disk tracker (via the PricePerGig API), new, used and recertified together, with for-parts listings and outliers removed. "Typical" is the median. The last column is the median of every listing logged that month. How this data is collected.
Bigger drives are usually cheaper per TB, and used or recertified enterprise drives (Seagate Exos, WD Ultrastar, Toshiba MG) tend to fill the cheapest rows. For price history at a specific size, see 14TB hard drive prices, 18TB hard drive prices or 1TB SSD prices.
Cloud Storage Cost per TB per Month
Cloud storage is billed every month, so compare it to a drive's one-time price over however long you'll keep the data. These are list prices for object storage, checked Oct 29, 2026:
| Service | Per TB per month | Per TB per year | Catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Backblaze B2 | $6.95 | $83.40 | Free egress up to 3x what you store each month, then $0.01/GB. No minimum storage duration. |
| Wasabi | $7.99 | $95.88 | No egress or API fees. 90-day minimum storage duration and a 1TB minimum monthly charge. |
| Amazon S3 Standard | $23.00 | $276.00 | $0.023/GB-month (first 50TB, us-east-1). Downloads cost $0.09/GB after the first 100GB a month. |
| Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive | $0.99 | $11.88 | $0.00099/GB-month. Archive only: restores take hours and retrieval is billed separately. |
Per decimal TB (1,000GB). Sources: Backblaze B2 pricing, Wasabi pricing, Amazon S3 pricing (us-east-1). Download (egress) fees are what usually surprise people: pulling 10TB back out of S3 Standard costs roughly $900.
Buy Drives or Pay for Cloud? A Worked Example
Say you want 20TB of usable storage with one level of redundancy. At home that means mirroring it across 40TB of hard drives; in the cloud you just pay for 20TB.
| 40TB of hard drives at today's typical price | $810 |
| 2-bay NAS enclosure (typical $/bay × 2) | $370 |
| Up-front cost at home | $1,180 |
| 20TB on Backblaze B2 | $139.00 a month ($1,668 a year) |
| Months until the drives are cheaper | About 9 |
That leaves out electricity, which depends on your drives and your rate; the power cost calculator will give you a yearly figure. It also leaves out your time, and the fact that drives eventually fail and need replacing.
The honest answer is that you want both. Drives are the cheap place to keep data you use; a cloud bucket is the cheap place to keep the off-site copy that survives a fire, a theft or a bad rebuild. That's the 3-2-1 rule I cover in data hoarding, and for an archive copy you rarely touch, a tier like Glacier Deep Archive costs about $12 per TB per year.
What About SAN and Enterprise Storage?
Enterprise SAN and NAS arrays are priced by quote, with controllers, software licenses and multi-year support contracts bundled together, so there's no honest public per-TB number to put here. The drives inside are only part of the bill. If you're pricing the hardware side yourself, a used Supermicro storage server filled from the drive tracker is how most homelabs build their own "SAN" for a fraction of the cost.
Related Resources
Hard Drive & SSD Price Tracker
Every listing behind the numbers on this page, ranked by $/TB.
NAS Enclosure Tracker
Diskless Synology, QNAP, UGREEN and more, ranked by $/bay.
Data Hoarding
How I store and back up a growing pile of data, 3-2-1 included.
Monthly Price Index
$/TB month over month, alongside RAM, GPUs and the rest.
Power Cost Calculator
The running cost the break-even example leaves out.
TrueNAS Scale on Proxmox
Turning a pile of cheap drives into a proper NAS.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does 1TB of storage cost?
As of Oct 30, 2026, the typical listing on my disk tracker works out to about $20.25 per TB for internal hard drives, $92.50 per TB for SATA SSDs and $113 per TB for NVMe SSDs, paid once. In the cloud, 1TB costs $6.95 a month on Backblaze B2, $7.99 on Wasabi and about $23 on Amazon S3 Standard.
What is the cheapest storage per TB?
Large hard drives. The cheapest internal hard drive listing on my tracker right now is $7.32 per TB, and big used or recertified enterprise drives are usually the ones at the top. For data you almost never read back, archive cloud tiers such as S3 Glacier Deep Archive cost about $0.99 per TB per month, but restores are slow and billed separately.
Is it cheaper to buy hard drives or use cloud storage?
For storage you keep for more than a few months, buying drives is usually cheaper. Mirroring 20TB at home takes 40TB of drives, about $810 at the current typical hard drive price, plus around $370 for a 2-bay NAS. Keeping the same 20TB on Backblaze B2 costs $139 a month, so the drives pay for themselves in about 9 months, before electricity. The cloud copy is still worth paying for as your off-site backup.
How much does SAN storage cost per terabyte?
There isn't a public per-TB price. Enterprise SAN arrays are sold by quote, with controllers, software licenses and support contracts bundled in, so the raw drives are only part of the cost. This page covers prices you can actually look up: drives, NAS enclosures and cloud storage.
How do you calculate cost per TB?
Divide the price by the capacity in terabytes: a $240 16TB drive costs $15 per TB. For cost per GB, divide by 1,000 again ($0.015 per GB). Drive makers and this page use decimal terabytes (1TB = 1,000GB), so a drive shows slightly less capacity in Windows, which counts in binary units.