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u/deeddy

r/unRAID r/HomeNAS r/selfhosted r/truenas
▲ 134 r/HomeNAS

If you've been meaning to buy NAS drives, don't wait for too long!

If you're planning to buy NAS drives soon, you might not want to wait any longer. The AI/datacenter buildout has hit hard drives hard:

  • WD has said its entire HDD output is sold out for all of 2026; enterprise drives are quoted on ~2-year backorders.
  • HDD contract prices jumped the most in 8 quarters, and the vast majority of drive revenue now goes to cloud/enterprise = very thin inventory for the rest of us.
  • Reports have the average drive up around 46% in recent months. And it's not just an enterprise problem anymore - it's hitting the shelf.

I track cheapest $/TB daily across 8 countries, and bare drives are around $30-34/TB right now. For years that number kept dropping. But that flipped last fall - prices have been climbing since around September 2025, and with the supply reserved through 2026, the safe bet is it keeps going up, not down.

What's everyone seeing? Stocking up on drives now, or hoping it blows over?

reddit.com
u/deeddy — 7 days ago
▲ 406 r/unRAID+3 crossposts

Made a free NAS hard-drive comparison website: CMR vs SMR verified, Backblaze failure rates, and live $/TB for 4 regions: US/DE/UK/FR

I need more than a petabyte of storage, so I'm buying drives fairly regularly, and every time I hit the same wall. It's working out which current models are actually CMR, then their real failure rates, then the honest $/TB today. It means three different places that never line up: spec sheets, Backblaze's data, and a dozen of Amazon tabs. Just finding all the CMR drives is a pain, let alone comparing them.

So, I built one filterable table myself. It got a bit out of hand and overnight turned into a website, so I figured I'd share it: www.nasdisks.com

Fair warning: it's still in beta, so you might hit the odd rough edge or a missing drive. Honestly that's part of why I'm posting: to get it stress-tested.

What's in it:

  • CMR vs SMR, verified for each disk - filter SMR out entirely, including the drives WD and Seagate quietly shipped as SMR into NAS lines.
  • Real failure rates - included failure rate from Backblaze's 2025 Drive Stats, shown for each tracked disk model.
  • Live $/TB across 4 regions: US / DE / UK / FR - it's a sortable list, in local currency (all regions are in English!), with a price-history chart for each drive, so you can easily tell whether "today's deal" is actually a deal, or not.
  • Head-to-head compare pages - put any two drives side by side on specs, CMR/SMR, failure rate and $/TB.
  • Free tools - RAID usable-capacity, RAID failure risk (your array's odds of losing data, based on real Backblaze rates + rebuild time), a storage planner, and a power-cost calculator.
  • Open data + an embeddable widget - the drive specs and CMR/SMR classification are downloadable as JSON/CSV under CC BY 4.0. Backblaze's 2025 failure rates are included too, from Backblaze Drive Stats (credit Backblaze). There's also a drop-in "cheapest $/TB" widget for your own site or blog.

Full transparency on the money: the only revenue is the outbound buy buttons, which are Amazon. I added them for one reason: to cover hosting so the site can stay up, and that's the whole catch. No account, no ads, no email wall, and nothing is behind closed doors: the table, the failure rate data, the charts and the tools - all work whether or not you ever buy anything.

What I'd actually appreciate feedback on:

  • Honest first impressions - is it useful, what's confusing or missing, would you actually use it? Good and bad are both welcome.
  • Drives I'm missing, especially current enterprise / Toshiba drives.
  • Whether my CMR/SMR data match what you've seen in the wild.
  • Any reliability source you'd trust beyond Backblaze for consumer NAS drives.

https://www.nasdisks.com

I'm looking forward to hearing your opinion!

u/deeddy — 11 days ago