Homelab Hardware Price Index: October 2026
What homelab hardware costs this month, and how that compares with last month, from listings my trackers log every few hours.
By Brandon Sheley · Updated
What this is: a monthly snapshot of homelab hardware prices, built from my own price tracker history rather than anyone's press release. Every number is a median of real listings, updated as the month goes on.
It exists because I already log every listing my trackers see. Rolling those up by month gives a simple, quotable answer to “are drives getting cheaper?” that you can check against the live trackers.
This Month's Numbers
Headline: in October 2026 so far, the median internal hard drive on my tracker costs $19/TB, down 4.2% from September 2026. Medians of every logged listing-day in the month; "change" compares this month so far with last month.
| Category | September 2026 | October 2026 (to date) | Change | Listing-days |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Internal hard drives | $19/TB | $19/TB | -4.2% | 859 |
| External hard drives | $24/TB | $24/TB | -0.1% | 598 |
| SATA SSDs | $92/TB | $90/TB | -2.4% | 216 |
| NVMe SSDs | $110/TB | $115/TB | +4.5% | 279 |
| Server RAM (DDR4 ECC RDIMM) | — | $5.00/GB | — | 105 |
| Desktop RAM (DDR5) | — | $16/GB | — | 90 |
| Laptop / mini PC RAM (DDR4 SO-DIMM) | — | $2.50/GB | — | 48 |
| GPUs for local AI | — | $23/GB VRAM | — | 483 |
| Mini PCs and 1L business PCs | — | $539 | — | 366 |
| NAS enclosures | — | $195/bay | — | 150 |
| Used rack servers | — | $23/bay | — | 585 |
| Network switches | — | $15/port | — | 538 |
| Solar panels (DIY) | $0.38/W | $0.38/W | 0.0% | 234 |
A dash means fewer than 10 logged listing-days that month, usually because tracking for that category started partway through it. Hard drive and SSD history goes back to early September 2026; the eBay-based trackers started logging in mid-October 2026, so their month-over-month figures fill in from November.
What's Moving
- NVMe SSDs rose 4.5%, from $110/TB to $115/TB.
- Internal hard drives fell 4.2%, from $19/TB to $19/TB.
Month-to-date numbers move as the month goes on, and one month is a short window, so treat small changes as noise. Each category's tracker page has the daily chart behind these numbers.
How the Index Is Calculated
- Source: the same listings my live trackers show. Hard drives and SSDs come from the PricePerGig API (pricing data courtesy of PricePerGig.com); mini PCs, RAM, GPUs, NAS units, servers and switches come from eBay's listings API; solar is a hand-checked retailer catalog.
- Counting: each listing counts once per day, at its lowest price that day. Listings marked for parts, as-is or untested are left out, and so are outliers under 30% or over 3x the month's median.
- Metric: the median of price per unit ($/TB, $/GB, $/bay, $/port, $/W) for each category, or the plain price for mini PCs, which don't have one natural unit.
- Asking prices, not sold prices. These are what sellers are asking, which tracks the market but runs a little above what things actually sell for.
The full rules are on the tracker methodology page.
Quoting These Numbers
You're welcome to quote figures from this page in an article, a forum post or a video. Please cite it as “sheley.org Homelab Hardware Price Index, <month> <year>” with a link to this page, and mention the month, since the numbers change. For a specific drive size or model, the individual trackers and their price history pages have daily figures.
Related Resources
All Price Trackers
The live trackers behind every row in the index.
Hard Drive & SSD Prices
Live $/TB rankings and history by drive size.
RAM Price Tracker
Server, desktop and laptop memory by $/GB.
Tracker Methodology
Exactly how listings are collected, filtered and counted.
Mini PC Price Tracker
The listings behind the mini PC row.
Power Cost Calculator
The other half of what hardware really costs.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Homelab Hardware Price Index?
A monthly summary of what homelab hardware is selling for, built from the listings my live price trackers log: hard drives and SSDs per TB, RAM per GB, GPUs per GB of VRAM, NAS and server costs per bay, switch costs per port, mini PC prices and DIY solar per watt. Each figure is the median of every logged listing-day that month.
How often is the price index updated?
Continuously. The trackers refresh every few hours and this page recalculates from the logged history, so the current month's column fills in as the month goes on and becomes final when the month ends.
What is a good price per TB for a hard drive right now?
On my tracker, the median internal hard drive in October 2026 so far costs $18.57 per TB, and the cheapest listings are well under that. Anything under the median is a better-than-typical deal; the live disk tracker ranks every current listing by price per TB.
Where does the price index data come from?
From the same sources as my trackers: the PricePerGig API for hard drives and SSDs, eBay's official listings API for mini PCs, RAM, GPUs, NAS units, servers and switches, and a hand-checked retailer catalog for solar panels. They're asking prices from current listings, not completed sales.