After more than ten years of data recovery and storage sales, I first met a customer who came to buy a hard drive. I advised him not to buy it first-not because it was expensive, but because it was expensive.The price of buying now is likely to be higher, and some capacity segments cannot be ordered at all..
The mechanical hard drive market in 2026 is no longer "price increase" can be summarized, it is structural shortage.
To what extent is the shortage: several sets of data
| index | data | source |
|---|---|---|
| Near-line Enterprise Current Price | $14-$15/TB | Industry Channel Price |
| Vendor Target Price | $25-$30/TB | Three original factory price increase guidelines for downstream |
| Supply and demand gap in 2026 | Approximately 300 EB | Morgan Stanley estimates |
| HDD Average Price Increase | +46% from September 2025 | Average channel price |
| typical model | IronWolf 4TB: $70 → $99 | Retail Price Comparison |
| supply state | Seagate, Western Digital 2026 production capacityall sold outLong-term agreements scheduled for 2027-2028 | Original factory notification of channels |
The phrase "capacity sold out" is extremely rare in the history of the hard drive industry. Normal storage markets are cyclical fluctuations-oversupply will reduce prices to inventory, supply exceeds demand will increase prices to expand production. But this time is different:The price has gone up, but the original factory has not expanded its production.
Why Price Increase Does Not Expand Production: Rational Choice of Three Oligarchs
There are only three players left in the global mechanical hard drive market: Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba. This is a typical oligopoly market, and the behavior logic of the three players is highly consistent:
- History teaches us too much.From 2019 to 2023, the storage industry experienced several rounds of fierce price wars. HDD gross profit once fell to single digits or even losses. All three learned the same thing: it is better to sell less than to fight price wars. Expanding production means increasing supply, falling prices, and returning to that nightmare.
- The capital return on expansion is not cost-effective.It takes 18-24 months and huge capital expenditure to build a new HDD production line (including heads, disks and precision assembly). Although the data growth in the AI era is fast, the incremental demand is largely eaten up by SSD and cloud, and there is uncertainty in the long-term demand curve of HDD. The board of directors will not approve a possible excess capacity in 3-5 years.
- Production control + price increase = profit maximization.Without expansion, production capacity is limited, demand is rigid (data centers must have large capacity cold storage), prices naturally rise, and all three benefit. This is a Nash equilibrium: any one expansion alone will destroy the industry price, so no one moves.
- Give priority to large customers.Hyperscale cloud vendors (AWS, Azure, Google, Meta) lock in the vast majority of capacity with 3-5 year LTAs. Channels and SMBs get what's left, with the lowest priority and highest price.
The demand-side push is equally clear:The data generated by AI training is massive, and most of the trained data becomes "warm and cold data"-infrequently accessed but not deleted.(Compliance retention, model training corpus, inference logs). Storage costs for this type of data are sensitive, SSD is too expensive (30TB QLC SSD costs 22.6 times more per TB than HDD), and can only be used on HDD. Morgan Stanley estimates that the 300EB gap mainly comes from data centers.
HAMR: Only supply-side variable, but wait
Seagate's HAMR (Thermally Assisted Magnetic Recording) technology is key to increasing single-disk capacity-using lasers to instantaneously heat media locally to make high-coercivity materials writable, thus achieving higher recording densities. Seagate Mozaic 3+ series has been mass-produced at 32TB, and the roadmap points to 40TB+.
However, HAMR cannot solve the shortage in the short term for three reasons:
- Yield ramp slow.HAMR involves laser, near-field optical head, special medium, process complexity far more than traditional PMR/CMR, initial yield and reliability verification cycle is long.
- Capacity is limited.HAMR production line is newly built, with small initial capacity scale, giving priority to cloud manufacturers who have signed long-term agreements.
- The price is higher.The initial premium of the new technology is obvious. The cost per TB of 32TB HAMR disk is higher than that of mature 20TB CMR disk. It is not cost-effective for SMEs to buy it.
Western Digital's ePMR/OptiNAND route and Toshiba's FC-MAMR take a gradual upgrade to a capacity of 26-30TB, also giving priority to large customers.Conclusion: In 2026 - 2027, the supply to SMEs and NAS users will not improve significantly.
Procurement suggestions for three scenarios
NAS Home/Studio Users
- If you want to expand, buy now, don't wait.NAS disk (Seagate IronWolf, Western Digital Red Plus) 4-8TB segment is still available, although the price has increased, but the supply is stable. The order cycle for more than 16TB has been extended to 2-3 months.
- Capacity selection is a long-term account.8TB now costs about RMB 1,400–1,600, and 16TB about RMB 2,400–2,800 (cheaper per TB). If data doubles in the next two years, it's more cost-effective to buy large capacity directly-because the next batch will be more expensive.
- Don't buy CCTV drives or corporate teardown disks as NAS disks to save money.Monitoring disk (purple disk/cool eagle) firmware for continuous write optimization, random read and write poor, put NAS file sharing will be obvious card; enterprise disassembly disk power time is not controllable, used to store unique data is gambling.
- Look at SMART before retiring old disks.05 (reallocate sectors), C5 (to be mapped), C6 (irreparable) Any item that is not 0 should be replaced, do not wait until the array is degraded.
Enterprise backup and archiving
- Reevaluate the backup strategy for "all-on-disk."In 2026, the price of large-capacity HDD will rise, and the cost model of pure disk backup will change. For cold data (no access for more than 90 days), tape (LTO-9 single tape 18TB, the cost per TB is still much lower than HDD) and cloud archiving (Alibaba Cloud OSS archive type is about RMB 0.033/GB/month) will become attractive again.
- 3-2-1 backup "1 offsite" priority cloud.Buy a 20TB hard drive offsite, cost 3000+ and manual synchronization; cloud archiving pay by volume, automatic synchronization, natural offsite. Disadvantages are slow recovery (archive type retrieval takes several hours to a day) and long-term cost accumulation, suitable for cold data.
- The budget should be prepared according to the price increase.The IT budget will be made in 2026. The hard drive part will be seriously overspent according to the historical price in 2025. The manufacturer's target price is to increase the current price by 70-100%.
surveillance storage
- The price increase of monitoring panel is relatively mild, but the large-capacity segment is also tense.Monitoring scenarios (7×24 continuous writing) must be replaced by monitoring dedicated disks (Western Digital Purple Disk, Seagate Cool Eagle), not ordinary disks-the design load of ordinary disks is 8 hours per day, monitoring is 24 hours, and the life difference is three times.
- Bit rate conversion capacity can be appropriately reduced.32-channel 4 megapixel main stream 4Mbps continuous write about 45MB/s, about 3.8 TB a day. If the storage budget is tight, reduce the secondary channel to 2Mbps or reduce the frame rate to 15fps, you can save 40-50% capacity, and keep the key channel high bit rate. This is the most practical way to save money in the current price environment.
Guangzhou market reference price in September 2026 (ACCPC channel price, tax included)
| Type/Capacity | model ref. | retail price | Wholesale price (from RMB 5) | supply state |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NAS Disk 4TB | Western Digital Red Disk Plus /Seagate Cool Wolf | $820-$950 | RMB 740–860 | cash commodity |
| NAS Disk 8TB | Red Disk Plus /Cool Wolf Pro | 1400-1600 RMB | $1280-$1450 | Spot, price fluctuations |
| NAS Disk 16TB | Cool Wolf Pro /Red Disk Pro | RMB 2400–2800 | 2150-2500 RMB | Order 2-4 Zhou |
| Enterprise disk 20TB | Seagate Exos X20/Western Digital Ultrastar | RMB 3200–3800 | RMB 2900–3400 | Ordering 4-8 Zhou |
| Surveillance drive 4TB | Western Digital Purple Disk/Seagate Cool Eagle | 680-800 RMB | $610-$720 | cash commodity |
| Monitor 8TB | Purple Disk Pro /Cool Eagle AI | $1250-$1450 | RMB 1120–1300 | cash commodity |
| Desktop Disk 2TB | Toshiba P300 /Western Digital Blue Disk | $380-$450 | $340-$400 | cash commodity |
Price changes weekly, please confirm by phone before purchasing. ACCPC does wholesale hard drive (Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba, Armor, NAS disk/enterprise disk/CCTV drive/desktop disk), enterprise bulk purchase can lock the price for 30 days, including SMART detection and burn-in test delivery (to avoid bad). It also provides data recovery services-hard drive price increases in the years, the existing disk data to save back is often more cost-effective than buying a new disk. Telephone 020-39029800.