Consumer hard drives are now rare, while enterprise, NAS and video drives dominate
Hard disk drives are often written off as legacy tech, but a closer look at what is still on sale tells a different story.
After compiling a detailed list of 167 of the best hard disk drives worth buying, six clear points emerged about who is still making HDDs, what they're building, and who they're actually for.
The first thing which stands out relates to brand. Western Digital has more drives on the list than anyone else, with 66 models spanning consumer, NAS, enterprise, and specialist categories. That range stretches from WD Blue consumer drives to WD Gold and Ultrastar models designed for data centers.
My second takeaway concerns capacity. Seagate is the king of the high end drives, offering six models above 30TB, including multiple Exos M and Exos X variants that go far beyond what most people associate with spinning disks.
No other manufacturer comes close. While HDDs have disappeared from many consumer devices, capacity growth at the top end is still hugely important.
Capacity clustering tells its own story. 8TB is the most common size on the list, appearing 21 times, followed closely by 12TB with 20 entries.
These capacities show up repeatedly in families like WD Red Plus, Seagate IronWolf, and Toshiba N300. Drives below 8TB are now all but obsolete in new 3.5-inch models.
The fourth finding likely won't come as a huge surprise. Almost half of the models, 80 in total, are enterprise drives designed for data centers and large-scale storage.
Product lines such as Seagate Exos, WD Ultrastar, and Toshiba MG dominate this category, and it's where most HDD development effort is now focused, rather than on everyday desktops.
The fifth takeaway reveals a more focused audience. There are 43 NAS-specific drives, including Seagate IronWolf and IronWolf Pro, WD Red Plus and Red Pro, and Toshiba's N300 range. These are built for always-on systems in home servers and small businesses.
Surveillance drives are far less common, with only 17 models dedicated to video workloads, such as WD Purple and Seagate SkyHawk AI.
Interestingly, only 10 drives on the long list are aimed at mainstream consumers and Toshiba is the only manufacturer still treating hard drives as performance hardware. If offers 15 models in its X300 and X300 Pro lines for high-performance desktops and workstations rather than everyday PCs.
It's clear that while HDDs haven't disappeared, as SSDs took over speed-driven tasks, spinning disks have now settled into roles where capacity, durability, and cost per TB matter the most.
A quick note on the list. It excludes all hard disk drives below 8TB, which are now all but obsolete in new 3.5-inch models. It also only includes 3.5-inch drives, not 2.5-inch ones. Drives from professional refurbishers or relabeled models sold under brands like HP or Dell were left out. Where multiple SKUs of the same drive existed with minor differences such as cache size, encryption, or formatting, only a single representative model was counted.