Data storage requirements have kept increasing over the last several years. While SSDs have taken over the role of the primary drive in most computing systems, hard drives continue to be the storage media of choice in areas dealing with large amount of relatively cold data. Hard drives are also suitable for workloads that are largely sequential and not performance sensitive. The $/GB metric for SSDs (particularly with QLC in the picture) is showing a downward trend, but it is still not low enough to match HDDs in that market segment.

Since the release of the last HDD guide which was in the midst of the cryptocurrency-fueled storage mania, we have seen the pricing and availability of the HDDs stabilize a bit. With the traditional mid-Q3 HDD capacity updates from the different vendors around the corner, the pricing on the high-capacity models has in fact come down considerably. Stock updates for previously out-of-stock SKUs are lined up, and retail prices for drives across multiple capacities are now below what they were last month. These make for an interesting update to our list of recommended hard drives for NAS and desktop usage.