CAMPBELL, Calif. - eTradeWire -- eRacks Open Source Systems today published six months of hard drive street-price data from its own purchasing and daily price tracking, showing the cost of storage capacity rising sharply across every major drive line in 2026.

The company tracks the street price of every major drive line every day because it quotes storage servers every day. Measured as the cost per terabyte (TB) of raw capacity, from March to August:

- Seagate Barracuda: $16.25 to $31.25 per TB, up 92 percent - WD Red Pro: $24.84 to $41.22 per TB, up 66 percent - Seagate IronWolf Pro: $21.78 to $33.75 per TB, up 55 percent - WD Gold: $29.79 to $44.17 per TB, up 48 percent - Toshiba MG enterprise: $22.17 to $30.64 per TB, up 38 percent - Seagate Exos SATA: $24.33 to $27.92 per TB, up 15 percent

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The enterprise lines moved least and the consumer lines moved most, but nothing fell. The same demand behind this year's memory and GPU inflation now reaches spinning disk.

"We watch these numbers because we pay them, on every drive that goes into a customer build," said Joseph Wolff, founder and CTO of eRacks Systems. "The old habit was to buy extra capacity while it was cheap. It is not cheap, and it is not getting cheaper, so that habit now costs you."

The company's advice to storage buyers follows from the data: size an array for real near-term growth rather than stocking up, leave drive bays open for later, and compare offers on dollars per terabyte instead of the headline discount on a single drive. Every eRacks NAS (network-attached storage) quote is re-priced against the day's drive market, and the company tells customers when waiting is the better call.

The full breakdown, including why the enterprise lines held up best and which capacities the shortage hits hardest, is on the eRacks blog: https://blog.eracks.com/2026/09/hard-drive-price-per-tb-tracking-2026-08/