TerabyteDeals – Compare storage prices by $/TB | Hacker News Reader

TerabyteDeals – Compare storage prices by $/TB

terabytedeals.com

148 pointsvektor88888 comments

I built a simple tool to compare hard drive and SSD prices by price-per-terabyte.

I kept having to calculate $/TB manually when shopping for NAS drives, so I made this to save myself the trouble.

It pulls prices from Amazon (US, CA, AU, and EU stores), calculates $/TB, and lets you filter by drive type, interface, form factor, and capacity.

Nothing fancy — just a sortable table updated daily.

Any feedback is more than welcome, I hope someone will find it useful!

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How is it different from https://diskprices.com/ ?

Many users are pointing out that the concept is very similar.

The product listings are perhaps different?

yes, OPs one has strictly less listings (diskprices.com does multiple countries).

Even terabytedeals.com does, you have a drawer in the top-right corner!

or https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/#sort=...

Well, for one, the prices are less accurate... ;)

i tried 5 items. all of the prices are widely off. i just gave up.

you have to find the "renewed" price somewhat hidden on the amazon page

I've noticed diskprices.com getting increasingly bad with filters, probably because the source data is garbage with Amazon sellers trying to jam all the keywords into titles or descriptions/features..."M.2 USB-C 3.2 PCIE NVME"

It's different in that diskprices doesn't make money for the OP, while it only costed the OP 15$ in claude credits to slopvibe a competitor.

Nobody wants to compete. I just shared something I use myself, hoping it could help someone else. Of course, to keep it running, I need to make a profit, since the Amazon API alone won't let me discover so many products, and I need to get product info

If users won't find anything useful, I will simply put it offline and run it on demand whenever I need a new drive.

As many users pointed out, neither DiskPrices' idea nor mine is unique; there are many alternatives with different product listings.

It is only a benefit for the users if they have more choice

Neither allow filtering for CMR (vs SMR) or TLC (vs QLC).

Neither have a column for Endurance (TBW), or power consumption (load watt, idle watt, RPM...).

Both list disks not actually available for purchase (fake prices).

Very limited usefulness.

This is because brands are not 100% transparent on this, they could change how they assemble a specific model based on availability.

Amazon doesn't expose this data

The prices don't seem accurate on the ones I checked. Maybe they were a few months ago, but there's been a lot of stock shortages, especially for larger HDDs, and it's been driving up prices.

Thanks for the input!

This should be the price as shown in the product listings for the category. Perhaps, depending on product availability, you are shown different prices on the product page.

I will take a better look into this, but I can confirm that this data is very recent (about 4-5 hours ago), definitely not months old

https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/#sort=...

It has Amazon as well as many other stores, and several other filtering options. It supports hard drives, SSDs, and other computer parts (everything that you need to build a computer). It also has a compatibility checker if you give it a complete parts list. It also works in several countries.

Man even spinning rust has inflated. In mid 2024 I got a 8TB WD Blue for $115 and now the cheapest 8TB I see on PcPartPicker is $160... isn't that like 30% increase in a year or so? :/

We didn't know how good we had it.

$115 / 8 TB is $14.38/TB. In the last 2 or 3 months there have been drives for far less per TB (closer to $10/TB), but it seems like the sweet spot for the best deals has significantly increased in TB.

I treat the average disk price for new disks as $20/TB, so while we had a couple of years of good deals, it's now back to normal.

Why?

I filtered for ssd only, minimum 2tb, top 5 prices are wrong or the product is not available on Amazon US

These sites all suffer from the same defect, amazon pa-api pricing is NOT consistent in any region with the carted values an end user will be shown. This is a well known thing if you have worked with that api before and you are essentially just dropping the authors 24 hr amz cookie for them to earn off all other sales. Not to say thats bad, but the value add from a price comparison site like this is minimal to the end user as you will very likely not get that shown price.

Unfortunately, this is what I sometimes experience, and I am not sure there's much that can be done. I am already trying to filter out outliers, but if a price looks "plausible", this filtering doesn't do much.

Sometimes I get prices for items that are unavailable or completely off (perhaps from a 3rd-party seller?).

Is this really it? The prices just seem completely wrong from the links I clicked. I can’t imagine the PA-API is really that far off for every product, unless something has changed drastically from the last time I used the API.

I am still working on availability, but prices should look more accurate for US products

At least for France prices are wildly innacurate. The actual ones are 150 to 200% the price on the table.

I checked 6 to 8 TB HDDs.

Thanks for the feedback!

These prices are 5-6 hours old. While working on this site, I noticed that Amazon pricing can be very dynamic.

Moreover, it could be that Amazon is returning the retail price, but because of current availability, once you land on the product page, you are shown prices from a different seller

https://diskprices.com/ has always served me well

https://pricepergig.com/ is another one. Found that on r/datahoarder

This also looks interesting, thanks!

Yes, I guess I should have done some more due diligence before reinventing the wheel...

Hopefully, I will find some ways to differentiate. Something I don't see there is a filter by brand or a text search across all fields. I was planning to add these in a next iteration

Ways to differentiate: On your site I can click the column heading to change the sorting.

I'm a little surprised someone said disk prices was the best option. Changing the sort by column seems like bare minimum UI feature in 202X.

The best-designed website on the internet.

I had heard that relatively high capacity tape storage was still a thing, but I didn't realize it was a thing to this extent.

I haven't needed to buy a spinning hard drive in about 5 years. I have no idea how to choose one any more. There are so many variations. Red, Purple, Blue, Gaming, Enterprise, Business.

I just want to store some files.

Easy. What color are your files? Get a hard drive with a matching color otherwise your files will turn brown

But two of any brands and use ZFS. That’s the easiest (though you can check Backblaze if you want to spend a few hours interpreting data that ultimately won’t matter much).

The thing that makes the most difference is a drive being CMR vs an SMR one. CMR ones are recommended if you are ever going to write large-ish amounts of data in one go or if you ever plan to make a raid 5/ raid 6 arrays.

SMR drives are now what you find on most consumer drives between with capacities 1<x<8 tb (higher capacities too, but depends on the manufacturer) , they have a CMR area of the platter as a sort of write cache (like slc cache in ssds), while the rest of the platter will be really slow to write to. The write head is wider than the read head, so to overwrite something the drive has to first read and copy somewhere else the data on the track(s) that would be overwritten. This makes whole drive writes really slow and can kill raid 5/6 since resilvers would take very long, possibly even a month, instead of a few days.

Besides the recording technology, the color of the label and the product line name are mostly marketing and won't make too much of a difference for simple usage.

Fully agree on CMR being the way to go, especially for things like home servers.

The only other value might be the power on hours (POH). Effectively the intended daily running time. If youre looking for something that sits in a server, best pick something with 24h.

Beyond that I think the only other difference is warranty. I know Toshiba gives 5 years on their higher end pro models.

There have always been different types of hard drives...

> I just want to store some files.

Then get the cheapest. The differences don't matter to you.

A graph could be fun. Also sources other than Amazon, especially https://serverpartdeals.com/.

I was thinking about including additional stores at some point, but mainly from the EU.

Once Amazon's pricing issues stabilize, I will try including some more sources!

Anything like this for the Indian market as well? I tried diskprices,terabytedeals & pricepergig (currently the only 3 websites mentioned right now in comments/main post show hn itself) and none of them support Indian services.

If someone does support Indian markets, I have a minor suggestion to include both Amazon and flipkart.

I would honestly really appreciate a quick website I can point out to in my local community so vektor if possible, can you please add it?

What are your thoughts on it?

I tried to have a look, but from my associates central, I cannot enable affiliations on the Indian store, sorry!

Moreover, I am not familiar with the Flipkart platform myself

Yup don't worry about flipkart if that's the case, but can you please add atleast the amazon.in's suggestion. Thanks for trying with flipkart as well tho! But are you able to connect it with amazon.in?

Unfortunately not, I can see a bunch of other EU countries and Japan, but not India

Hm is there any definite reason for this? Perhaps I can try a hand at it but can you please tell me what's the thing which stops you maybe?

No worries about it tho I am just curious and good luck for the project!

Edit: looks like diskprices does support India, I may have missed the spot as I wasn't wearing glasses!

https://diskprices.com/?locale=in

Cool! I'm happy you've found something working for the Indian marketplaces!

You might be interested in the list of similar services to this, from my own similar service (see the list at the bottom)

https://listofdisks.pages.dev/

Note, this is painfully out of date, I no longer maintain it.

How did you get the data? I went the scraping route after having difficulty qualifying for access to Amazons API as I didn't generate enough purchases via the affiliate links. Would be interested in hearing how you approached this.

I have another website where I made qualified sales and gained access to their APIs.

The rate limit is a bit low, so I mixed that with scraping too.

Feedback:

Interesting. Glad there was a drop down to pick a bunch of different sources. I was expecting it to be US central but was happy when I saw I could search for amazon.co.uk

An ability to search for NAS drives, even if it's just a substring search within the product name, would be great.

Also a search on drive speed. I'm not interested in 5400rpm drives, only 7200rpm+.

(I'm looking for a bunch of 7200rpm drives that are NAS rated, so I'm not interested in generic consumer grade 5400rpm drives right now.)

Thanks for your input!

Adding a filter on drive speed is definitely feasible. I will add it as soon as possible

> 500 Internal Server Error

> The operation is insecure.

As a backend engineer, I am beyond tired of frontend engineers taking what is a Javascript programming error ("[Uncaught DOMException:] The operation is insecure" is a JS exception. It is most commonly raised when a page wants access to APIs without permission to such) and blaming it on the backend ("500 Internal Server Error" — except this is just a lie. No 500s occurred).

looks like you've made considerable changes since comments; all prices I checked were accurate (while nothing I checked on diskprices was). this looks genuinely helpful as this is something I look into myself by manually looking around, and is clean/easy-to-use; bookmarked it. only thing I might like on top of this is to be able to filter by if renewed or not, though they seem to often have it in the product title.

Every price i checked on Amazon.de was wrong on your website, this is totally useless! Often the real price is like 300% higher

Thanks for the input!

As I mentioned to other users, Amazon's pricing seems to be quite dynamic. This data is just 4-5 hours old, but it already seems quite stale.

Note taken that it should be updated more frequently!

Not affiliated, but for Germany I'd check https://gh.de ... For technical products you can filter for mostly any relevant detail... At least most German shops are there, and only a few not.

I am always curious why there doesn't seem to be something similar everywhere?

Not to be yet another critical voice, but where are your prices actually coming from? I'm in the US, and I just chose the top three "Price/TB" items and none of the prices on your site agree with the actual item pages on Amazon.

  - Toshiba X300 16TB Performance & Gaming 3.5-Inch Internal Hard Drive
  - https://terabytedeals.com/us: $229.95
  - https://amazon.com/dp/B0CYQXNCVZ: $353.30 new

  - Western Digital 18TB WD Red Pro NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD
  - https://terabytedeals.com/us: $259.99
  - https://amazon.com/dp/B08K3TFM92: $361.53 used, $549.59 new

  - Western Digital 22TB WD Purple Pro Surveillance Internal Hard Drive HDD
  - https://terabytedeals.com/us: $329.69
  - https://amazon.com/dp/B0B5VYRJ6Q: $465.00 new

You can claim Amazon price volatility, but I don't suspect that to be what's going on here. CamelCamelCamel price history graphs show that these items have never been anywhere near the terabytedeals.com prices looking back the last three months, including Amazon, 3rd Party New, or 3rd Party Used prices.

  - https://3cmls.co/US/B0CYQXNCVZ
  - https://3cmls.co/US/B08K3TFM92
  - https://3cmls.co/US/B0B5VYRJ6Q

In fact, my spidey senses are tingling. The only strings that match the terabytedeals.com prices are completely different items.

These other items and prices only appear if you choose the "See All Buying Options" button or the "Other sellers on Amazon" menu. Then wait for the "Didn't find what you were looking for? Consider these alternative items" section to load.

  - For B0CYQXNCVZ (16TB), Amazon offers https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07NTDWMSQ (6TB) which *IS* listed as $229.95.
  - For B08K3TFM92 (18TB), Amazon offers https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CMJPRLJV (18TB) which *IS* listed as $259.99.
  - For B0B5VYRJ6Q (22TB), Amazon offers https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0966V6YJB (12TB) which *IS* listed as $329.69.

That this pattern holds true for three items, seems like maybe the wrong prices are being scraped somehow?

You are onto something, I am using a mix of scraping and APIs, and the scraped products don't seem to be accurate due to a faulty CSS selector.

I am running the process once again to get some - hopefully - better data!

Was about to say, but it looks like you’re working on it!

Cool idea, it’s already been helpful to me even with the often inaccurate scraping.

Great! Looking forward to giving it another go once the data has refreshed.

Congrats on the launch!

US data should now be refreshed. Prices look much better, but I am still working on product availability. In some cases the API is returning a price and the only way around that is scraping

UX bug:

I don't use dark mode. Every time I open this site, it firstly shows in dark mode and then switches to light mode after 0.x seconds.

That’s because the HTML code is server-side rendered (SSR) with data-theme="dark" hardcoded on the <html> element, so on the initial page load the browser immediately renders with dark mode styles applied. After ± 500ms-600ms Nuxt’s JavaScript hydration kicks in (as this is a Nuxt app based on __NUXT__ at line 11,236), which detects your macOS system preference via prefers-color-scheme media query and updates data-theme to "light".

This is much better than dark mode users getting flashbanged.

it shouldn't need to do this. Nuxt has a @nuxtjs/color-mode module which ensures that the correct colour scheme is applied before the browser starts rendering the html.

if the site author is lurking anywhere - may I recommend https://color-mode.nuxtjs.org ?

I am still checking the post, and I've already added color mode 1-2 days ago.

You can also expect some big changes to the UI very soon

The best price/TB in Amazon US are mostly NAS drives. For Amazon UK they are mostly external drives.

Just tried for Amazon UK.

Apparently the cheapest is £17.75 per TB for a 16 TB disk.

However the second cheapest is £18.75 for an 8, but if you click through the 8 has an option for 16 at £273, which is £17.06. Non-discounted. It's just generally cheaper than the sites suggested cheapest.

So it's unfortunately already demonstrably wrong with its first two suggestions.

would be better if a user can also filter by the total price range.

ie, if I have a budget of 100$, I would rather get the best out of it. (ie. Highest GB/TB)

This is great! Any plans of adding tape ?

Great job! Could someone explain what's SAS and what's the difference between SAS and HDD? I know I can google it but I value people experience.

Are you like serious? How "experience" can be applicable storage interface type?

Could not the content of your words been better spent answering the question.

> Could someone explain what's SAS and what's the difference between SAS and HDD?

This is like asking what's the difference between JavaScript and React. ish (some hand waving on the analogy)

The question you've asked can't really be answered? Idk what you're asking exactly.

SAS is comparable to SATA. Both can be used for HDDs. For individuals it doesn't really matter. For building huge-ass disk arrays, you might want to use SAS.

I was wondering if I would notice any difference in compatibility if cloning from a regular HDD. Thank you.

If only you had known about diskprices.com you could've saved yourself the trouble.

Oh well... nevertheless, it was a fun project to work on, and it still is!

I am planning to add some aggregated statistics (e.g. price trends by brand/category)

I guess you didn't read the amazon tos then. Price trends and history is not allowed.

Not for this specific use case.

Are platforms like Keepa violating Amazon's ToS then?

Ah, from the wording ("pull") I assumed you were using the API. You use your own user-agent to access the site(s) and collect prices then? Do you have any trouble getting blocked doing that? Is it some headless chrome controlled programatically?

I have another site that made some qualified sales, so I can use the APIs.

I also played a bit with scraping, and you can do that quite easily, but if you want to do it at some scale, you need lots of proxies, and quite soon it gets slow and overkill

ToS are not enforceable if you don't use an official product feed from Amazon in this case. As shown by thousands of companies providing exactly this service for competitor analysis.

i think they mean the ToS for amazon's affiliate link service, which prohibits earning a commission if your site has price history (a few large and old sites have exceptions)

Or just quickly pivot to RAM prices!

diskprices supports RAM as well :)

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