eRacks Systems Tech Blog
Open Source Experts Since 1999
Hard Drive Prices Jumped 40 to 90 Percent Since March: Six Months of Our Own Tracking
A sale landed in our feed this week: thirty dollars off an 8TB Barracuda. Nice, if you need one drive. It is also completely the wrong number to be watching.
We price storage servers every week, so we track drive street prices daily and keep the results on a public page. The metric that matters is not the sticker on any one drive, it is dollars per terabyte, and over the last six months it has gone one direction.
What actually happened
These are the best prices we found in each month, not averages, so they are the floor rather than the typical ask:
| Drive line | Class | March 2026 | August 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seagate Barracuda | Desktop | $16.25 | $31.25 | +92% |
| WD Red Pro | NAS | $24.84 | $41.22 | +66% |
| Seagate IronWolf Pro | NAS | $21.78 | $33.75 | +55% |
| WD Gold | Enterprise | $29.79 | $44.17 | +48% |
| Toshiba MG | Enterprise | $22.17 | $30.64 | +38% |
| Seagate Exos SATA | Enterprise | $24.33 | $27.92 | +15% |
The consumer line moved most, which is the tell. Desktop drives are the shock absorber of the storage market: they are the first to get discounted when supply is loose and the first to be repriced when it is tight. The enterprise lines with long supply contracts behind them moved least.
Why
The same squeeze that took DDR5 memory prices up this year is reaching spinning storage. AI datacenter buildouts are consuming manufacturing capacity and inventory across the board, and hard drives are being pulled into it as the cheap tier behind all those flash arrays. Meanwhile the drives most people actually buy, the 8TB to 16TB middle, are the ones the shortage bites hardest, because that is where consumer and datacenter demand overlap.
What this means if you are buying storage
Watch $/TB, not the discount. Thirty dollars off an 8TB drive that has already gone up sixty dollars per terabyte since spring is not a deal, it is a smaller increase. Divide the price by the capacity, every time, and compare that number to what the same class cost you last quarter.
The sweet spot moves. The cheapest terabyte is not always in the biggest drive, and in a shortage it moves around by the week. We publish the current best price per TB by capacity and by line, updated daily, at eracks.com/sweet-spots/drives, with the trend lines at the trends view. It is the same data we quote from, so you can check our arithmetic.
Buy the array you need now, not the one you will need in three years. The usual advice, buy extra capacity because it is cheap, assumes prices fall. They are not falling right now. Size the array for real growth, leave bays free, and add capacity when the market gives you a better number rather than paying today’s price for tomorrow’s data.
Fewer, larger drives still wins on the other costs. Even with prices up, a 24TB drive costs less per terabyte to power, cool, and rack than three 8TB drives, and it leaves bays open. The capacity ceiling keeps moving too: the largest drive in our catalog was 14TB in 2019, and it is 32TB today.
How we track it
A scraper walks the drive lines we actually build with, several times a day, records what each capacity costs from real listings, and computes price per terabyte. Every server quote we send is priced from that table on the day we send it, which is also why our quotes carry a refresh note: in a market moving this fast, a four-week-old number is fiction.
If you are sizing a storage server, a rackmount NAS, an all-flash array, or a media and video server, tell us the usable capacity you need and how fast it grows. We will size it against today’s numbers, show you the per-TB math, and tell you if waiting a quarter is the better move.
Common questions
Should I buy now or wait? Prices are not falling right now, so waiting is a bet, not a saving. Size the array for the growth you can actually forecast, leave bays free, and add capacity when the per-terabyte number improves.
Are enterprise drives worth the premium in a shortage? The gap narrowed: Toshiba MG enterprise at $30.64 per TB is now close to what a consumer Barracuda costs at $31.25, and the enterprise drive carries the longer warranty and the workload rating. When consumer pricing catches up to enterprise, buy enterprise.
Do these numbers include the drives in your servers? Yes. Every storage server we quote is priced from this same table on the day we quote it.
Scope note: our own daily tracking began in March 2026, so the chart is six months of first-hand data rather than a multi-year index. The capacity figures come from our catalog history.
joe September 3rd, 2026
Tags: component pricing, Exos, hard drive prices, NAS storage, price per TB, Seagate IronWolf, Storage Server, Toshiba MG, WD Gold, WD Red Pro, ZFS NAS
eRacks Expands NAS Lineup: 11 Models, 4 Bays to 100 Bays, From $1,995
eRacks Open Source Systems has expanded its rackmount NAS server lineup to 11 models, spanning from the 4-bay NAS4 at $1,995 to the 100-bay NAS100 at $29,995. The expansion targets the accelerating cost pressure of cloud storage subscriptions versus on-premise alternatives, with full Linux, ZFS, TrueNAS, and Ceph support across the entire range – and zero per-TB licensing fees.
The math behind on-premise NAS in 2026
Storing 100 terabytes on Amazon S3 costs roughly $27,600 per year in standard-tier fees. The same 100 TB sitting on an eRacks NAS24 – 24 bays, ~480 TB raw capacity – is a one-time $8,995 purchase. Payback is under four months.
Then there are egress fees. A single 100 TB pull from AWS to your office costs around $9,000 just to get your own data back. Cloud storage made sense when the data was small. At terabyte and petabyte scale, the math has flipped.
The lineup at a glance
| Model | Bays | Form Factor | Price (starting) | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NAS4 | 4 | 1U or desktop | $1,995 | Branch office, dev team |
| NAS6 | 6 | 1U | $2,995 | Small office, light backup |
| NAS8 | 8 | 2U | $4,995 | SMB primary file server |
| NAS12 | 12 | 2U | $5,995 | SMB with growth headroom |
| NAS16 | 16 | 3U | $6,995 | Mid-tier file + backup |
| NAS24 | 24 | 4U | $8,995 | Mid-enterprise (the bestseller) |
| NAS36 | 36 | 4U | $10,995 | Mid-large workloads, scale-out node |
| NAS50 | 50 | 4U top-load | $14,995 | Media production, surveillance |
| NAS60 | 60 | 4U top-load | $19,995 | High-density archive, large backup |
| NAS72 | 72 | 4U top-load | $24,995 | Broadcast, large-scale archive |
| NAS100 | 100 | 4U top-load | $29,995 | Petabyte-class, Ceph nodes |
Plus a parallel all-flash NAS lineup for performance-tier workloads: FLASH10 ($5,995), FLASH20 ($9,895), FLASH24 ($8,995), FLASH48 ($15,995), and FLASH72 ($19,985) – all-NVMe arrays for database backends, AI training datasets, virtualization storage, and any workload that needs IOPS rather than raw capacity.
Open source the whole way down
Every eRacks NAS ships with full Linux – not a locked appliance OS – and supports your choice of:
- ZFS with ECC RAM for data integrity
- TrueNAS Scale for the friendly web UI experience
- Ceph for clustered scale-out
- MinIO for S3-compatible object storage
- Nextcloud for private cloud file sharing
- OpenMediaVault for the lightweight option
- Proxmox if you want NAS + VMs in one box
No vendor licenses. No per-TB fees. Full root access. You own the OS, you own the data, you own the hardware.
Hardware standards across the line
ECC RAM as standard. Hot-swap drive bays throughout. Redundant power supply options on NAS12 and above. NVMe SSD caching on larger models for accelerated reads. 25 GbE networking on demand for AI training workloads, video production pipelines, and large-scale backup.
The lineup also scales without chassis replacement. A NAS50 shipping with 24 drives today expands to 50 as needs grow – no forklift upgrade required.
When does it pay off?
For most organizations storing more than 5 TB of business data, on-premise NAS is cheaper than cloud subscriptions in year one. For HIPAA-aligned healthcare deployments, law firms protecting privileged data, or any organization with data sovereignty requirements, on-premise is not just cheaper – it is the right architecture.
Custom-built since 1999
eRacks Open Source Systems has designed, built, and shipped custom Linux servers since 1999. Every system is configured to order, burn-in tested before shipping, and supported directly by engineers who built it. No call centers, no upsell scripts, no per-feature licensing.
Get a quote
The full NAS lineup is at eracks.com/products/rackmount-nas-servers. Contact us for a custom quote sized to your specific capacity, performance, and software-stack requirements.
joe April 29th, 2026
Posted In: Backups, Linux, NAS24, NAS50, NAS72, Storage
Tags: backup, Best-Practices, Cloud Storage Server, eRacks/NAS24, eRacks/NAS50, NAS, NAS24, NAS72, near-line storage, Storage, Storage Server
Heads-Up for Half Petabyte Cloud-Ready Storage Servers
eRacks/NAS50 Half Petabytes of Data Storage Server / Cloud Storage
We were extremely excited to announce the forthcoming release of 500 Terabyte (half Petabyte) storage space upgrade on our flagship product eRacks/NAS50 cloud data storage servers last week. The new model, to be released shortly, will incorporate 50 HGST 10 Terabyte HelioSeal™ hard drives. While the new model is not released yet, we are accepting pre-orders from customers. The current capacity, now available, of the eRacks/NAS50 is 400Terabytes in total, with currently-available 8Terabyte drives. The Azure devops security for data protection purposes as that must be a priority.
The new unit is rackmount and holds 50 removable drive bays. The 9U unit is suitable for any cloud storage application as well as NAS/Local LAN, since cloud services are really used now a days, you can learn how connecting to clouds directly can help businesses from this link. eRacks/NAS50™ is also a great solution for media libraries and other applications which require massive amounts of data storage capacity, you just have to make you are also backed up by the best data management services. Visit https://blog.couchbase.com/fuzzy-matching/ and get more information!
Our new servers are truly a remarkable Petascale solution. The HGST 10 Terabyte HelioSeal™ drives that come with eRacks/NAS50 use two technologies that greatly add to the value that this server carries with it, including other server services from sites as https://www.servermania.com/kb/articles/what-are-the-requirements-for-ubuntu-server/ for ubuntu projects.
The first is referred to as the HelioSeal™ technology. The HGST hard drives using this technology replace the air inside of the drive with helium. This would make the drive much lighter as well as allowing the disks to be much thinner. Due to the helium inside, the thinness of disks will not cause any disruptive turbulence effects. This will allow us to have more disks inside each drive which in turn means more data space. Additionally, helium drives have much lower power consumption, as much as 27%, making our NAS50 models truly a green product.
The new drives in the eRacks/NAS50 servers also make use of a technology called SMR. That is short for Shingled Magnetic Recording. This technology by itself adds another 25 to 100 percent storage capacity to HGST hard drives.
We are proud of our new eRacks/NAS50 and are ready to take pre-orders. We are prepared to customize the unit per your instructions with all Open-Source software necessary so your order will reach you completely pre-installed.
Please contact us for pre-orders or any questions you may have.
eRacks Open Source Systems
Phone: (714) 758-5423
Fax: (631) 392-9842
http://www.eRacks.com
eMail: info@eracks.com
Ron September 12th, 2015
Posted In: NAS50, New products, News, Open Source, servers, Upgrades
Tags: 500TB-class, 8TB, Archive Drives, Cloud Computing, Cloud Storage Server, HDD, HelioSeal. HGST, Hybrid Cloud, Internet, linux, NAS50, Open Source, Private Cloud, Rackmount, seagate, SMR, Storage Server
eRacks NAS36 Servers Store More Data At Lower Cost
eRacks Systems NAS36 8TB Seagate Archive Drive upgrade
We can’t help it with our innovations. Our NAS36 servers offered almost 200 Terabytes of data space already. That is considered quite high for a mid-range data storage server. But we just decided to jump even higher and exchange the standard 6-terabyte disks into 8-terabyte ones. That mean our NAS36 model storage servers are now able to hold 288 terabytes of data in total.
The new NAS36 model with higher data capacity brings even more value to our customers not just because of the storage space it provides but also for its price. Yes, we have decided to slash the prices down below $25,000. That is going to bring considerable saving to our customers. [UPDATE Sep 2015: current price for maxed-out 288TB config with Seagate Archive 8TB drives is just under $22,000]
We are proud to announce this latest upgrade as we continue to provide petascale data storage servers at affordable prices.
We remain dedicated to open-source systems. We also remain committed to delivering pre-installed, pre-configured systems to our customers.
The NAS36 servers are rack-mount servers. We designed the 4U unit specially to hold large number of drives in a very limited space. That leaves ample amount of space for other necessary accessories inside your data center rack.
The 36 drives in the unit are all Seagate Archive Drives, mounted on a single backplane and controlled by a RAID controller. The unit holds 24 drives in front and 12 in the back making the unit case quite compact.
eRacks Systems is a leading provider of high-capacity, petascale data storage server solutions to companies and enterprises requiring massive amounts of storage data.
Our servers are suitable for application and web security on the cloud as well as Near-Line Storage. They are also configurable for NAS (Network Attached Storage) applications.
For a great storage solution at a considerable low price, contact us. We are available through email, phone and our website.
Ron August 19th, 2015
Posted In: NAS36, New products, Open Source, servers, Upgrades
Tags: 288TB-class, 8TB, Archive Drives, Cloud Computing, Cloud Storage Server, HDD, Hybrid Cloud, Internet, linux, NAS36, Open Source, Private Cloud, Rackmount, seagate, Storage Server
Upgraded eRacks/NAS24 – 200-TB-class Storage for $14,880
We’ve upgraded our popular eRacks/NAS24 rackmount storage server for higher-storage-density – new 8TB Archive drives allow price-breakthrough $/density of nearly 192TB going for $14,880.
Configurable now, it combines a rack usage of only 4U with a density of 24 drives, which, when combined with the available technology of 8TB drives, yields a total storage configuration of up to 192TB.
What makes eRacks/NAS24 so unique
eRacks/NAS24 Storage Server
eRacks/NAS24
Motherboard: eRacks Intel Dual Xeon E5-2600 v2/v3 IPMI motherboard
CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2609 v3 (15M Cache, 1.90 GHz)
Memory: 4GB DDR4 Memory (2133/2400/2666) ECC / REG
Hard Drives: Seagate Archive 5-8TB 3.5″ SATA6 5900RPM SMR Hard Drive
RAID card: RAID 6 (striped with dual parity)
OS: 2x SSD 120GB Samsung 840 EVO or better, Mirrored
Email us at info (at) eracks.com or via our contact page at eracks.com/contact if you have any questions.
Read More in our Press Releases:
PR newswire – http://www.newswire.com/press-release/eracks-announces-upgraded-eracks-nas24-200-tb-class-storage-for
e-releases – http://eracks.com/mar-11-2015-eracks-announces-upgraded-eracks-nas24-200-tb-class-storage-under-20000/
Dennis
eRacks
Dennis April 13th, 2015
Posted In: NAS24, Open Source, Operating Systems, Reviews, servers, Upgrades
Tags: 200TB-class, 8TB, Archive Drives, Cloud Computing, Cloud Storage Server, HDD, Hybrid Cloud, Internet, linux, NAS24, Private Cloud, Rackmount, seagate, Storage Server, ubuntu