nas-drive-data/price-trends/README.md

2.2 KiB

NAS drive price trends

Monthly median price-per-terabyte for current 8TB+ NAS hard drives (US, new, in stock), from Jul 2024 to the latest month, split into the two tiers people choose between: consumer NAS (WD Red / IronWolf class) and enterprise (Exos / MG / Ultrastar).

Interactive version (hover, zoom, and a capacity-matched cheapest-per-TB table): nasdisks.com/articles/nas-drive-price-crunch

Part of the open NAS drive dataset, maintained at nasdisks.com.

The chart below tracks both tiers from Jul 2024 to the latest month. Prices held flat around $20 per terabyte for over a year, then climbed sharply from late 2025 to roughly double, and have stayed there since. Consumer NAS and enterprise drives moved almost in lockstep the whole way.

Median dollars per TB, consumer NAS vs enterprise

The trend

Median price-per-TB sat flat around $20/TB through 2024 and most of 2025, then roughly doubled to the mid-$40s/TB from late 2025, and has held there since. Both tiers moved together: among new drives, enterprise is not the price-per-TB bargain it's assumed to be, and both got hit about equally. The usual driver is the AI datacenter buildout pulling high-capacity nearline supply.

Files

Method

For each month, take each drive's average price-per-TB across its logged days, then the median of those per-drive values across drives (so a model with more logged days doesn't skew the month). Scope: 8TB and up, US, new in-stock prices, compiled from Amazon price history. CMR/SMR and specs from datasheets.

8TB and up because small drives carry a much higher price-per-TB (fixed per-drive costs spread over less capacity), and which small SKUs happen to be in stock would swing an all-capacity median for reasons unrelated to prices actually moving.

This folder publishes the computed monthly medians only, not the underlying per-drive price observations.