Artificial Intelligence Continues to Reap: Hard Drive Costs Rise by an Average of 46% - Media
Hard drive prices have risen sharply — by an average of 46% since September 2025. This is reported by the German publication ComputerBase, which analyzed the twelve most popular models on the market. The price increase affected almost the entire segment — from mass-market solutions to flagships.
Individual Seagate and Toshiba models have increased by more than 60%. For example, the legendary Seagate BarraCuda 24 TB, which recently cost about $239, now sells for about $500 — and mostly from third-party sellers.
The situation is similar in the American market. Tom’s Hardware confirms that the IronWolf 4 TB has risen in price from $70 to $99, and the 8 TB version — from $130 to $199.
According to ComputerBase, all key manufacturers — Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba — are showing the same dynamics, which indicates a systemic shortage, not local failures.
A similar situation is developing in Russia. An analysis of prices from major retailers shows growth in almost all positions. For example, the Seagate Exos 7E10 8 TB has risen in price from 18 to 32 thousand rubles since October 2025 — almost 80%, and in the first week of January the price tag even reached 38 thousand.
Seagate SkyHawk 4 TB has grown from 10 to 15 thousand, WD Purple Pro 10 TB — from 29 to 40 thousand at the beginning of the year and is now holding at around 36 thousand. Even "workhorses" like WD Blue 1 TB and Seagate BarraCuda have added 70–75% in a few months — from 7 to 12 thousand rubles.
Thus, even traditional HDDs, which were considered a "budget" storage option, are rapidly losing their price advantage.
The reasons for what is happening are directly related to the boom in artificial intelligence. Memory and storage manufacturers are reallocating capacity to corporate orders: server centers for training neural networks are absorbing more and more high-capacity storage devices. Even if HDDs are not technically dependent on the shortage of DRAM or HBM memory, the data storage market is now moving behind the AI trend — following video cards and SSDs.
For ordinary buyers, this means a simple thing: it is not worth waiting for prices to fall in the coming months. In the face of growing demand for computing power and storage, the trend towards higher prices is spreading to the entire component market.
