HardDiskIndexDrive guides that give the answer first, then the evidence.
13 guides · 4 new in the last two weeks · newest October 2, 2026
Prices and the 2026 shortage
,Why drive prices rose, whether to wait, and how much you need.
Why are hard drives and SSDs so expensive in 2026, and when will prices fall?, new, published October 2, 2026 Hard drive and SSD prices in 2026: why they doubled and when they ease Hard drive prices up 134%, SSD prices 129% in a year (German shops, Sep 2026) as AI data centres booked supply into 2028. Why, and dated forecasts of relief. Hard drives and SSDs cost over twice their September 2025 prices because AI data centres booked years of output from makers that had stopped expanding, and no forecast sees relief before late 2027 for SSDs or 2028 for hard drives.
Should I buy SSDs and hard drives now, or wait for prices to fall?, new, published October 2, 2026 Buy SSDs and hard drives now or wait? What the 2026-2028 forecasts say Hard drive makers are sold into 2028; no analyst sees SSD prices fall before mid-2027. Buy now or wait in 2026? Every forecast dated, and what waiting costs. If you will need the storage within a year, buy it now: no maker or named analyst traced here expects hard drive prices to fall before 2028, and the earliest any of them gives for cheaper SSDs is the second half of 2027.
How much storage do I really need?, new, published October 2, 2026 How much storage do you really need in 2026? SSD, games, photos, NAS A 1TB SSD holds about six big new games, but keeping 4TB of photos safe takes about 20TB of drives. How much storage you really need in 2026, laptop to NAS. A 1 TB SSD holds a working system and about six big new games, 2 TB suits a gaming or creative PC, and each terabyte you cannot afford to lose needs about five terabytes of drives to be kept properly.
Choosing a drive
,Flash or platters, which drive for a NAS or an array, and how to buy used.
How do I buy a used hard drive on eBay without getting burned? Buying used drives on eBay: what SMART tells you, and what it can't SMART on a used hard drive: catch reset power-on hours against the FARM log, compare spindle with head flying hours, then prove the capacity by writing it. You cannot make it safe. You can make it cheap, reversible and quickly falsifiable, and that is the entire game.
Should I buy a hard drive or an SSD? HDD or SSD: where each still wins, and why the gap persists HDD vs SSD, settled on access density: 2.5 IOPS per terabyte on a 32TB drive, a forty-hour full-surface read, and a flash tail as slow as a spinning disk. Flash for anything a person waits on. Platters for anything measured in terabytes that a person does not wait on.
What drives should I use in a NAS? Choosing drives for a NAS: what actually differs from a desktop NAS drives vs desktop drives: the error recovery timeout decides whether RAID ejects a healthy drive. Set it to 7 seconds with smartctl, then read it back. The mechanics are the same. A NAS drive and a desktop drive of the same generation often share platters, heads and firmware base.
How do I build a storage array with NVMe drives? Arrays with NVMe drives: how-to, do's and don'ts Four NVMe drives need 16 PCIe lanes. Count them before you buy, prefer mirrors to RAIDZ, and give the M.2 slots airflow. Home to rack scale, with the traps. Count the lanes before you count the drives, and for most home builds stop at a two-drive mirror.
Are used enterprise hard drives worth buying? Enterprise drive pulls: cheapest per terabyte, and what they need Used enterprise hard drives: read the workload rate off a SMART screenshot, spot a 520-byte sector, and tell a locked encrypting drive from a dead one. Usually yes, if you have somewhere to put them. Enterprise pulls sit at the top of every price-per-terabyte sort on this site for a supply reason rather than a quality reason: the drives are fine…
Specifications
,SMR, capacity, interfaces and endurance decoded, and NVMe as a cache.
How do I tell if a hard drive is SMR? CMR vs SMR: what shingled recording costs, and how to tell SMR vs CMR: no command proves a drive is conventional. Which checks return a real positive, and the four-hour write test that can produce a negative. Often you cannot, and anyone who tells you a model number settles it is guessing.
Why does my 4TB drive only show 3.64TB? Drive capacity explained: why 4TB shows up as 3.64TB TB vs TiB, byte for byte: exact sector counts up to 24TB, the whole-gibibyte check that flags a clipped used drive, and the 2.03% a SAS reformat returns. Nothing is missing. The drive holds four trillion bytes and a little over, and Windows is dividing those bytes by 1,024 four times while writing “TB” on the result.
What is the difference between SATA, SAS and NVMe? SATA, SAS, NVMe and M.2: what actually plugs into what SATA vs SAS vs NVMe: which drives fit which ports, why a SAS disk cannot seat in a SATA socket, and why a working used drive arrives dead on pin 3. SATA is a bus, a protocol and a connector that happen to share one name, which is why it is the easy case and why it teaches the wrong lesson.
How do I use an NVMe SSD to cache my hard drives?, new, published September 25, 2026 NVMe caching for mechanical drives: how to set it up Put NVMe in front of spinning disks: bcache, LVM cache, ZFS special vdev, Storage Spaces. Sizing, tuning, and which mode loses data on a power cut. More RAM first, then metadata on mirrored flash, and a block cache in front of the disks only third - a step most readers never need to reach.
How long will an SSD last before it wears out? SSD endurance: TBW, DWPD, and how worried to actually be TBW vs DWPD converted both ways, why 30GB a day takes 55 years to reach a 600TBW rating, and the SMART fields that show a used SSD's wear before you pay. Less than the internet thinks, and the reason is arithmetic rather than optimism.