Understanding Price per Terabyte ($/TB)
Price-per-terabyte ($/TB) is the single most useful number when buying storage in bulk. It normalizes very different drives — a 4TB and a 24TB, a New and a Recertified — onto one comparable figure, so you can see real value at a glance instead of being anchored to the sticker price. Here's how it works and how to use it well.
How to calculate it
Divide the drive's price by its usable capacity in terabytes. A 24TB drive at $600 is $25/TB; a 4TB drive at $120 is $30/TB — so despite costing 5x more, the 24TB drive is actually cheaper per unit of storage.
On our capacity collection pages we compute this for you and sort the table cheapest-per-TB first, so the best value on that capacity is always at the top.
Why bigger drives usually win on $/TB
Manufacturing and the fixed costs of a drive (controller, motor, enclosure) are spread over more capacity as density rises, so the newest high-capacity nearline drives typically deliver the lowest $/TB — until you reach the bleeding edge (the very newest capacity), where a density premium creeps back in.
That's why the value sweet spot is often one step below the maximum: a 22TB drive frequently beats a 24TB on $/TB while giving nearly the same density.
When $/TB isn't the whole story
$/TB is a capacity-value metric, not a performance one. For latency-sensitive workloads, interface (SAS vs SATA vs NVMe), endurance (DWPD on SSDs) and RPM matter more than raw $/TB. Use $/TB to shortlist on value, then filter by the specs your workload actually needs.
Also weigh condition: a Recertified drive lowers $/TB significantly for the same capacity, which is ideal for bulk and cold storage but worth balancing against warranty length for critical tiers.