I run some very rough estimation of storage price for different models of 3.5 HDD which was available in scorptec.com.au on 1-th of May 2022. Prices are in AUD with Australian taxes.
Input data can be found in this LibreOffice spreadsheet. ( Do not forget to recalculate pivot tables after you change anything in “Input data” tab)
I assumed that HDD live will be equal to warranty term. My personal experience is that at least all WD HDDs die within 6 month after warranty period ends when you run them 24x7. I’m not sure is it precise engineering or programmed failure. But did not notice same behaviour from Seagate HDDs
I also take in account idle power consumption of HDD assuming power cost of 0.25 AUD/kWh. More modern and bigger drives consume less power, so for bigger drives cost contribution of power consumption is negligible.
Most drives with exception of some WD Blues are CMR. I did not done any research to confirm it, and just believe tech specifications on Scorptec website. They are reputable seller after all. I still wonder what is use case for 2 TB SMR drive? Door stop?
Table bellow contains price per Tb per year. Price is calculated as
(Drive Cost)/(Warranty Years) + (Idle power consumption W) * 24 * 365 * (electricity price per kWh) /1000
First column shows drive capacity in TB and last column shows minimal price between all drives of given capacity.
| Capacity TB | BaraCuda | FireCuda | Iron Wolf Pro | IronWolf | WD Black | WD Blue | WD Red Plus | WD Red Pro | WD Ultrastar | Min price |
| 1 | 37.1 | 37.1 | 38.2 | 40.9 | 37.1 | |||||
| 2 | 29.8 | 27.9 | 36.6 | 29.4 | 24.0 | 29.0 | 31.8 | 24.0 | ||
| 3 | 25.3 | 27.3 | 26.0 | 21.2 | 21.2 | |||||
| 4 | 21.1 | 19.3 | 24.0 | 22.0 | 30.7 | 24.9 | 18.7 | 19.6 | 26.4 | 18.7 |
| 6 | 22.4 | 25.8 | 22.4 | 27.4 | 25.5 | 22.6 | 18.4 | 25.2 | 18.4 | |
| 8 | 20.5 | 23.3 | 25.4 | 30.4 | 21.3 | 22.7 | 21.4 | 19.8 | 23.2 | 19.8 |
| 10 | 20.9 | 24.9 | 20.7 | 23.4 | 19.5 | 22.9 | 19.5 | |||
| 12 | 20.8 | 24.5 | 19.4 | 15.4 | 22.4 | 15.4 | ||||
| 14 | 20.7 | 28.7 | 20.4 | 15.8 | 20.5 | 15.8 | ||||
| 16 | 20.3 | 26.7 | 17.2 | 20.2 | 17.2 | |||||
| 18 | 21.4 | 16.1 | 22.3 | 16.1 | ||||||
| 20 | 22.5 | 24.1 | 22.5 |
Same data but as graph.
WD RED Pro is a cheapest with Iron Wolf Pro not far behind. Interesting enough that 14 and 16 Tb Ultrastar-s are looking good and they are enterprise drives. Keeping WD reputation in mind I would personalty choose Seagate Iron Wolf pro. And for comparison Amazon Glacier costs 61AUD/Tb/Year + data retrieval cost. So self-hosting is cheaper even if you include cost of running a server.
Now an other question: If I need X TB of storage what should I choose. Small number of bigger drives ( and loose lots of capacity to parity disks) or lots of smaller disks in wider raid.
Next table show yearly cost of RAID6 containing 4,6 and 10 disks populated by cheapest disks available. Cheapest options highlighted by bold font.
| Capacity Tb | 10 x raid6 | 6 x raid6 | 4 x raid6 |
| 2 | 148.3 | ||
| 4 | 222.4 | 191.6 | |
| 6 | 254.8 | ||
| 8 | 370.7 | 287.5 | 299.3 |
| 12 | 382.2 | 441.7 | |
| 16 | 479.1 | 448.9 | 633.6 |
| 20 | 778.2 | ||
| 24 | 637.0 | 662.5 | 738.3 |
| 28 | 887.1 | ||
| 32 | 748.2 | 950.4 | 1103.8 |
| 36 | 1162.6 | ||
| 40 | 1167.2 | 1802.8 | |
| 48 | 1104.2 | 1107.5 | |
| 56 | 1330.7 | ||
| 64 | 1583.9 | 1655.7 | |
| 72 | 1744.0 | ||
| 80 | 1945.4 | 2704.2 | |
| 96 | 1845.8 | ||
| 112 | 2217.8 | ||
| 128 | 2759.4 | ||
| 144 | 2906.6 | ||
| 160 | 4507.0 |