Hardware, ranked by what it actually costs you.
GPUs, memory and storage are all in shortage — prices are inflated and noisy. DealBytes tracks each category by the only number that matters: dollars per GB of VRAM, per GB, and per TB. Buy when the value is real, skip when it isn't.
Best $/TB right now: recertified enterprise drives
Manufacturer-recertified bare drives routinely undercut every new external on dollars-per-terabyte. Tracked daily from ServerPartDeals — SATA only here; the full list includes SAS.
| Drive | TB | Interface | $/TB | Price | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Western DigitalUltrastar DC HC550Manufacturer Recertified | 18 | SATA | $27.17 | $489.00 | View → |
| Western DigitalUltrastar DC HC580Manufacturer Recertified | 24 | SATA | $27.46 | $659.00 | View → |
| SeagateExos X20Manufacturer Recertified | 18 | SATA | $27.72 | $499.00 | View → |
| Western DigitalIU HA570Manufacturer Recertified | 24 | SATA | $27.88 | $669.00 | View → |
| Western DigitalUltrastar DC HC580Manufacturer Recertified | 24 | SATA | $28.71 | $689.00 | View → |
| SeagateExosCMRManufacturer Recertified | 26 | SATA | $28.81 | $749.00 | View → |
Bare-drive listings and prices read from ServerPartDeals Sep 17, 2026, 6:15 AM. Condition shown is the seller's own listing label. These are plain links — DealBytes has no affiliate relationship with ServerPartDeals and earns nothing from them.
Why dollars-per-unit?
A 32 GB GPU isn't twice as good as a 16 GB one if it costs three times as much. A 4 TB SSD on "sale" can still be worse value than a 2 TB. Raw price hides the real deal — value per unit exposes it. For local AI it's $/GB VRAM (VRAM is what lets a model run at all); for memory it's $/GB; for storage it's $/TB.
Across GPUs, DDR5 and flash, prices are elevated by genuine supply shortages — and they're likely to stay that way for a while. That makes a value tracker more useful, not less: it tells you which specific parts are still worth buying today, and flags the rest to wait on. Every tracker refreshes daily and links straight to the live retailer price.