If you've been shopping for storage, then you're more than well aware of the incredible prices of SSD and HDD storage options. Gone are the days of super-cheap drives, and welcome to the current economic climate where we try to eke out as many savings as possible on the expensive, yet essential hardware that we rely on for our work and hobbies. On sale at its lowest price since April of this year, you can head to Best Buy and grab an 8TB Seagate Barracuda HDD for $249.99, a saving of $30 on the $279.99 list price.

● Check out this deal at Best Buy

At this price, the drive works out to cost $31.24 per TeraByte. Yes, this is a crazy high price compared to several years ago, but that's not the current reality in which we reside. In today's storage market, it's actually a fair price per TeraByte compared to the competition. We have reviewed the 8TB Seagate Barracuda, so if you'd like to see more information on this HDD to help you in your shopping journey, then please check out our review.

The 8TB Seagate Barracuda isn't the fastest HDD out there. It's designed to be lower in price rather than offer astonishing performance; however, it's perfectly adequate in most situations as long as you're not looking for breakneck speeds. In our PCMark 10 benchmarking test, we use a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of our tested drives. You can see in our tables below that it isn't the fastest drive, but it does beat out some of the competition.

The Seagate Barracuda comes in a standard 3.5-inch metal chassis and is an SMR (shingled magnetic recording) drive with a 256MB cache and 5,400 RPM disk spin speed. A SATA 6Gb/s interface delivers the fastest transfer speeds available for HDDs and makes plug-and-play exceptionally easy.

If you're looking for a disk drive for use in a home server setup or media center, and want something on the cheaper side (cheaper for the current climate) then the Seagate Barracuda range is a one of the main choices available on the HDD market, however, being an SMR drive there are some drawbacks in certain operations, and Seagate only offer a shorter 2-year limited warranty with this HDD.

Storage prices are exceptionally high at the moment, with no end in sight to when the cost of a new drive will fall to the all-time lows of days gone by. If you still need to fill the drive bays of your NAS, though, there are some HDDs available that have received small discounts. Best Buy is currently hosting its 60th Anniversary sales event, with discounts across the board on various tech items, but the deal we're interested in today is on Seagate's 8TB IronWolf NAS Hard Disk Drive, which has had $167 chopped off the list price, making it now $349.99.

● Check out this deal at Best Buy

At this price, the drive works out to cost $43.74 per TeraByte, which is high compared to the price per TB of larger HDD drives, but you're looking at a lower cost per unit if you're going to purchase multiple drives for backup redundancy. 8TB may not seem the greatest size, seeing as you can get 28TB capacities, but those drives cost considerably more in the current economic climate.

The Seagate IronWolf comes in a standard 3.5-inch metal chassis and is a CMR drive with a 256MB cache and 7,200 RPM disk spin speed. A SATA 6Gb/s interface delivers the fastest transfer speeds available for HDDs and makes plug-and-play exceptionally easy. The IronWolf HDDs have some of the fastest available speeds for NAS operation and are designed for 24/7 operation in a NAS storage environment, with lower noise and vibration.

If you're looking for a disk drive for use in a home server setup or media center, and want reliable, hard-working drives, then the IronWolf range of HDDs from Seagate is perfect for the job. Designed for durability and continued 24/7 operation, the IronWolf HDD comes with a 5-year limited warranty from Seagate.

Economists Christoph Siemroth of the University of Essex and Yeomyung Park of Sungkyunkwan University have published a peer-reviewed IEEE study that re-crunches 12 years of Backblaze's public drive data, covering 443,156 hard drives and more than 1.66 million drive-years from 2013 through Q2 2025, and finds that HGST drives fail at roughly 41% of Seagate's rate when drives of matched age, capacity, form factor, and operating temperature are compared. WD comes in at about 52% of Seagate's failure rate, while Toshiba sits in last at 107%. As for the most reliable brand in the ranking? HGST, one you can't buy new after WD acquired it in 2012 and wound it down.

Backblaze's quarterly reports compare whichever drives are available at the time, and the authors argue that approach stacks old drives against young ones because each manufacturer's fleet skews to a different era. HGST led new installations in 2014, Seagate dominated from 2015 to 2020, Toshiba topped 2023, and WD topped 2024, so raw annualized figures pit aging Seagate and HGST stock against much fresher Toshiba and WD units. A further 146,943 drives, about 31% of the sample, exited the dataset without ever failing, mostly pulled during capacity upgrades.

Toshiba's monthly failure rate more than quadruples once its drives pass 60 months in service, a monolithic jump that no other manufacturer in the dataset shows at any age. Between 50 and 100 months, Toshiba units failed at five to six per 1,000 drives per month, while the other three brands generally stayed at or below 2.5. Seagate's failure rate started highest among young drives but held steady with age. Backblaze's own analysis of its dead drives previously found most failures happened before three years of service.

Each additional one-degree Celsius of average drive temperature raised failure rates by 2.1% in the models, compounding to roughly 23% across a 10 degrees Celsius increase. Each extra terabyte of capacity cut failure rates by about 3.4%, which the authors attribute partly to helium-filled enclosures and newer head-fabrication processes in higher-capacity designs.

The dataset consists of enterprise drives run in Backblaze's data centers, so the ranking may not carry over to consumer models. Backblaze doesn't record comparable workload data across manufacturers, and only 0.52% of sampled drives ran longer than a decade, so the estimates reflect short- to medium-term reliability.

The authors also suggest WD's ownership of HGST plausibly explains why the two brands sit closest together, given the potential for shared technology. Backblaze's most recent annual report, published in February, put its fleet-wide annualized failure rate for 2025 at 1.36%.

It's a sorry state of affairs in the storage component sector at the moment, with prices having doubled or more since the AI boom moved in to destroy the PC component ecosystem. Prices and deals are now relative to the current climate, not to what was available a year ago, unfortunately. Today we have a decent $50 discount off of a large 24TB HDD, which turns it into one of the best value drives of this size currently available. Seagate's Barracuda Compute 24TB HDD is reduced to $699.99 when you use code BTSF2883 at checkout. That works out to $29.16 per Terabyte, or $0.02 per Gigabyte. In years gone by, we have seen this drive a lot cheaper in sales such as Black Friday, before the extreme compute price inflation took effect. But if you're hunting for a large HDD, then this is one of the best deals you're currently going to find.

● Check out this deal at Newegg

The Seagate BarraCuda comes in a standard 3.5-inch metal chassis and is a CMR drive with a 512MB cache and 7,200 RPM disk spin speed. A SATA 6Gb/s interface delivers up to 190 MB/s transfer speeds, some of the fastest available speeds for this kind of storage, and is the standard for most PC and NAS setups. Its large capacity means you can store reams of data, including pictures and video files.

The massive 24TB capacity of this drive is perfect for someone looking for a large storage drive for a media center or for a big backup drive in a PC. Although the Seagate Barracuda Compute is fast for an HDD, it's not fast enough for modern gaming; you definitely want an SSD for that. But for storing movies, videos, and other media, this drive is perfect.

Seagate is on track to start qualification of its hard disk drives featuring 50TB-class capacities in late calendar 2027, with shipments to follow in 2028, the company announced this week. Demand for HDDs is so strong because of the rise of AI and continued strength of the cloud computing business that most drives are sold out through 2028 and negotiations about allocations for 2029 are ongoing.

"Mozaic 5, our 5+ terabyte per disk platform, remains on track for qualification shipments in late calendar 2027," said Dave Mosley, chief executive officer of Seagate, during the company's earnings call with financial analysts and investors.

Mozaic 5 is the company's 3^rd generation platform for commercial hard drives based on Seagate's heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology that succeeds Mozaic 3 and Mozaic 4. The Mozaic 5 platform enables the company to build platters with over 5TB capacity and consequently build 10-platter HDDs with over 50TB capacity featuring conventional magnetic recording (CMR) for clients seeking performance and versatility or shingled magnetic recording (SMR) for clients that need maximum capacity to maximize their storage density.

If Seagate preps to initiate 'qualification shipments' of its 50TB-class hard drives in late calendar 2027, then it means that by the time the HDDs have passed all the manufacturer's internal validations, including reliability and durability of heads and media, shock and vibration tests, and longevity tests among many others. It typically takes server OEMs about two to six months to qualify new HDDs for their offerings, whereas hyperscale cloud service providers usually qualify them for six to 12 months. In any case, it is safe to say that Seagate is on track to ship 50TB-class hard drives in calendar 2028 with significant volume ramp in 2029.

These 50TB-class HDDs will come to market just in time to meet exabyte demand from the AI and cloud sectors. Most of Seagate's nearline HDDs have been allocated for 2027 and 2029 under long-term supply agreements (LTAs), with some customers looking to secure supply in 2029.

"Based on the long-term supply agreements in place today, the vast majority of our nearline exabytes are now allocated into calendar 2028," Mosley said. "[…] As our strategic relationships deepen, many are actively seeking to extend planning horizons through 2029 and beyond, which we believe reflects growing confidence in their own long-term infrastructure needs."

Seagate's LTAs not only define exabytes, but also product configuration and prices. As it turns out, both are set for the 'entirety of calendar 2027.' Meanwhile, Seagate is flexible on pricing of drives that are not covered by LTAs as well as newly signed LTAs, so the company is implying price increases, following makers of 3D NAND and SSDs.

"We continue to execute our value-based pricing strategy, balancing a stronger demand environment with our objective of supporting sustainable, profitable growth over the long term," Mosley said.

"Our volume was a little bit higher in fiscal Q4," said Gianluca Romano, chief financial officer of Seagate, during the call. "We think can be maybe a little bit of output available in fiscal Q1. Of course, we are pricing that increased output at a very good price right now."

The key advantage of Seagate's high-capacity drives based on the company's Mozaic platforms is, of course, its HAMR technology, which is gradually increasing its share within the company's nearline HDD shipments. HAMR-based products accounted for a 40% exabyte share of Seagate's nearline HDDs as of early July and are on track to account for 70% of the company's nearline exabytes shipments by early July 2027. Moreover, nearly half of Seagate's nearline capacity will rely on its 40TB-class HDDs featuring its Mozaic 4 platform.

"We expect to achieve our next ramp milestone by exiting calendar 2026 with 50% of our HAMR exabytes on our Mozaic 4 platform," Mosley said.

For the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2026 ended on July 3, Seagate earned $3.629 billion, up from $2.444 billion it earned in the same quarter a year ago. The company's gross margin totaled 52.3%, up from 37.4% in Q4 FY2025, and its net income reached $1.294 billion. The company's FY2026 revenue was $12.195 billion, up from $9.097 billion in the prior year. The net income increased more than twice year-over-year to $3.184 billion, with gross margin reaching 45.6%.