When Will Hard Drive Prices Come Down? The Honest 2026-2028 Outlook

It is the question we get asked more than any other right now, and it is the most searched phrase that brings people to this blog. So here is the straight answer: SSD prices should start to ease in the second half of 2027. Hard drives will take longer, probably into 2028, because the factories that make them have already sold that output.

That is not a guess. It comes from the analysts who track memory contract prices every quarter, and from what Seagate and Western Digital told their own investors this summer. Below we lay out the evidence, explain why spinning drives and SSDs are running on different clocks, and give you a realistic timeline with the signals to watch.

We have been following this since the start. Our April explainer on the storage price surge covered why prices took off. This article is the follow-up everyone keeps asking for: when does it end?

While you wait, the cheapest terabyte is the one you already own. DriveVault scans each of your external drives once and keeps a searchable catalogue of everything on them, so you can see free space, spot duplicate project folders and find old files without plugging anything in. For a lot of people that audit pushes the next drive purchase back by months, which is exactly what you want when prices are at a record.

Where Prices Stand in September 2026

Before looking forward, it helps to be honest about where we are. The German tech site ComputerBase has priced the same dozen popular drives every month since mid-September 2025, which makes its tracker one of the cleanest before-and-after records of this crisis. Its one-year check, published today, shows hard drives averaging 134% above their pre-crisis prices, up from 129% a month earlier. SSDs are 129% higher, up from 126%. Both are new records.

Source: ComputerBase price check, 16 September 2026. German retail prices, excluding eBay and Amazon Marketplace sellers.

The pattern in that table matters. The biggest hard drives, the 18TB to 24TB models that data centres also buy, have risen fastest. The smaller desktop drives most creatives actually use have "only" doubled. If you are shopping for a budget external drive, you are feeling the mild end of this.

The one encouraging detail: the monthly increases have shrunk to a few percentage points. Prices are still climbing, but the curve is flattening. That is usually the first stage before a market turns.

Why Hard Drives and SSDs Will Recover at Different Times

Most coverage lumps "storage prices" together. That hides the most useful part of the answer, because hard drives and SSDs are made by different companies, in different factories, and sold in different ways.

SSDs follow the chip market

SSDs are built from NAND flash chips made by Samsung, SK hynix, Kioxia, Micron, Sandisk and YMTC. Those chips are priced quarter by quarter in contract negotiations, and some trade on a spot market that moves weekly. When supply catches up, SSD prices can respond within a couple of quarters. They went up fast. They can come down reasonably fast too.

Hard drives follow multi-year contracts

Hard drives come from essentially two companies, Seagate and Western Digital, with Toshiba a distant third. Almost all of their output now goes to cloud providers on long-term agreements. Those agreements lock in volume and, crucially, price for years at a time. That is why hard drive prices rose later and more steadily than SSDs, and it is why they will be slower to fall.

The SSD Timeline: What the Analysts Say

TrendForce is the most widely cited memory pricing firm, and its forecasts have been the best guide through this cycle. Here is how its view has shifted during 2026.

At the start of the year, it was forecasting NAND contract prices rising 33 to 38% in a single quarter, with client SSDs rising at least 40% as suppliers moved capacity to data centre drives. By July the tone had changed. Its third-quarter survey forecast a much smaller 10 to 15% rise for NAND, and said plainly that PC and smartphone makers had hit the limit of what they could afford to pay.

Then came the forecast that actually answers the question. In its July NAND update, TrendForce said the market would run a 4 to 5% supply deficit through 2026, then move back into balance in the second half of 2027. The reasons it gives are ordinary ones: manufacturers squeezing more bits out of existing fabs, steady output growth, and consumer demand staying weak because everything costs so much. It expects notebook shipments to fall around 10% this year and shrink again in 2027.

New supply is also arriving from China. YMTC reached around 14% of global NAND shipments in the second quarter and has told investors it wants to be the world's largest NAND maker by the end of 2027, backed by a planned $4.9 billion share listing. Even if it falls short of that target, that much extra flash entering the market is exactly the kind of pressure that pushes SSD prices down.

You may also have seen SK hynix's chief executive say that 2027 will be the worst supply year in the industry's history. That sounds like it contradicts TrendForce, but it mostly does not. His comments are about memory overall, and the worst of the squeeze is in DRAM and the high-bandwidth memory used in AI accelerators. TrendForce itself now describes a diverging market in 2027: DRAM staying tight while NAND eases. That is good news for SSDs and less good news for RAM, which is part of why Macs keep getting more expensive, as we covered in our piece on Apple's price rises.

The Hard Drive Timeline: Booked Into 2028

For spinning drives, the most reliable evidence is what the two big manufacturers said on their earnings calls this summer. It is not encouraging for anyone hoping for a quick drop.

Seagate reported its fiscal year results on 28 July, with a record 52.7% gross margin. On the call, management said data centres now take around 90% of the capacity it ships, and that the vast majority of its high-capacity drive output is now allocated into calendar 2028. Seagate also told investors it has contracts setting both product configuration and pricing for the whole of 2027, and that it is not adding drive manufacturing capacity. Its plan is to cram more data onto each disk instead.

Western Digital tells the same story. Its fourth-quarter revenue rose 44% year on year, while the amount of storage it shipped rose only 22%. The gap is price. According to analysis of the earnings call, the company's average price per terabyte rose by a high-teens percentage, and its long-term agreements run through 2027 with two major customers and through 2028 with one, with price terms attached.

Put simply: the companies are sold out, they are making record margins, their contracts fix prices into 2028, and they have chosen not to build more factories. None of those conditions produce falling retail prices.

So where does hard drive relief come from?

Density. Seagate's HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording) drives already make up around 40% of its data centre capacity shipments, and Western Digital plans full-scale HAMR production in 2027. As the cloud giants move to 36TB, 40TB and larger drives, the cost per terabyte falls for everyone, and older production lines can eventually be freed up for the consumer and mid-capacity drives you and I buy. That is a slow, grinding process. It points to prices levelling off through 2027 and easing from 2028, rather than a sudden correction.

A Realistic Timeline

Pulling all of that together, here is our best reading of how the next two years should play out. Treat it as a forecast, not a promise. Every forecast in this cycle so far has been revised at least once.

• Rest of 2026 Still rising, but slowly Small monthly increases for both hard drives and SSDs. Black Friday may bring a handful of genuine deals on specific SSDs, but no broad drop. The NAND market stays in deficit.
• First half of 2027 The plateau SSD contract prices flatten as new flash supply builds. Hard drive prices hold at their peak under long-term contracts. DRAM remains very tight, so Macs and PCs stay expensive.
• Second half of 2027 SSDs start to ease NAND supply and demand move into balance. Portable and internal SSD prices begin a gradual decline, with the largest capacities, which rose most, likely to fall most. Hard drives stay broadly flat.
• 2028 onwards Hard drives follow As current contracts roll off and HAMR drives dominate data centres, hard drive cost per terabyte should improve. Prices should settle meaningfully below today's levels, but probably above 2024's.

What Could Change the Timeline

It could come sooner if AI infrastructure spending cools, Chinese NAND output ramps faster than expected, or consumer demand stays so weak that manufacturers start discounting to move stock. Module makers are already sitting on higher inventories because shoppers have stopped buying, which is the kind of pressure that eventually breaks prices.

It could come later if agentic AI takes off and data centres start storing far more data per user, if more manufacturers follow Micron's Crucial brand out of the consumer market, or if trade restrictions tighten on Chinese memory makers.

Signals worth watching

• A flat or falling quarter in TrendForce's NAND contract survey. That would be the first since the crisis began, and the clearest sign SSD relief is on its way.
• ComputerBase's monthly price check going negative for SSDs or hard drives. It publishes mid-month and is a good public scoreboard.
• New SSD launches at the same or lower prices than the models they replace. The recent Samsung P9 and P7 did the opposite.
• Seagate or Western Digital mentioning pricing pressure or customers delaying orders. So far, both say demand visibility is improving.

Should You Buy Now or Wait?

That depends entirely on why you need the storage. Here is how we would think about it.

Frequently Asked Questions

The Bottom Line

Storage prices will come down. Just not yet, and not evenly. SSDs are on track to turn first, from the second half of 2027, as new flash supply catches up and consumer demand stays weak. Hard drives are locked into contracts that run into 2028, and their recovery will be slower and quieter, carried by bigger drives rather than price cuts.

The practical move for the next year is simple. Buy what you genuinely need, skip the stockpile, and get every usable terabyte out of the drives already on your desk. We will update this article as the forecasts change.