The largest SSD and hard drive of 2024

The largest SSD and hard drive options together on one page

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1.Largest SSD2.Largest HDD3.Largest portable HDD4.Largest laptop HDD5.Largest removable6.Today’s deals

Finding the largest SSD and hard drives can be a challenge with technology and innovations rapidly changing the state of play. We checked out which are the largest internal and external drives you can get right now and whether biggest is best.

Even with limitless online storage, nothing beats physical storage for saving high-volume files, games, large videos and other high-quality media. These devices are also well-placed and well-spaced to form part of any secure backup process.

We’ve tested thebest SSDandbest hard drive, benchmarked some of thefastest hard drivesandfastest SSDs. Now, we’re comparing the largest SSDs and hard drives on the market right now. We’ve looked at the top deals on units that balance portability, speed, and that all-important storage capacity at the best value price.

Need shareable storage? We haven’t included them in this round-up, but check out our picks for thebest NAS hard drives.

Today’s best deals

Backup large drives online with cloud storageIDrive, thecloud backupveteran, delivers tons of storage online for an incredibly small outlay.10TB for $4.98for the first year is unmatched till now and so is the support for unlimited devices and the extensive file versioning system available. Even the biggest SSD or HDD need acloud storageto secure data.

The largest SSD and hard drive in 2024

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We’ve tested countless storage devices looking for the largest SSD and hard drive models, and we’ve brought together our top picks in every category below. Note that we’ve only accounted for those which can be purchased, rather than those that have just been announced.

The largest SSD on the market

ExaDrive EDDCT100/EDDCS100

ExaDrive specializes in extra high capacity 3.5-inch solid state drives for data centers. The biggest model it currently has is the EDDCT100 which retails for a staggering $40,000 or $400 per TB. As of October 2024, that is about 9x the price of the cheapest SSD on a per TB basis (This Patriot Burst Elite 1.92TB SSD costs just under $82 on Amazon).

Available with a SATA or SAS interface, it offers an unlimited drive write per day for five years (the length of the warranty) thanks partly to the use of SLC technology (which explains the price as well). A cheaper version of the Exadrive, the EDNLT064, is also available and is the second largest solid state drive on the market with a capacity of 64TB but swaps TLC for QLC.

At $10,900 it offers a relatively more palatable price point and a per TB price of only $170 compared to its bigger brother. In comparison, 18TB hard drives have a per TB starting from as little as $13 but they are bigger, noisier, slower, heavier, consume more power and are statistically more likely to fail .

Honorable mentions to:

Seagate launched a 60TB SSDin 2016. It was a prototype but we don’t know whether it was sold.I approached Seagate in May 2023 to find out what happened to it and this is what they said to me.

Largest portable SSD

Samsung T5 EVO

TheSamsung T5 EVOportable SSD is the cheapest 8TB external SSD on the market at the time of writing at just under $450. On a per TB basis, this is cheaper than any internal 8TB SSD on sale as of October 2024. Bear in mind though that (a) you can open it up and use the SSD inside as there’s no SSD strictly speaking (b) the T5 EVO is  woefully slow at 460MB/sec.

For something slightly speedier, check out theSandisk 8TB Desk Drive SSDwhich is more expensive but is more than twice faster and would top my leaderboard as my daily storage driver.

Honorable 8TB external SSD mentions include:

The largest HDD on the market

Western Digital, Seagate 32TB HDDs

As of October 2024, the largest hard disk drives released have a capacity of 32TB. There’s the WD Ultrastar DC HC690, which has 10 platters and uses SMR technology.Seagateadded a 32TB hard disk drive to itsExos Mozaic 3+range as well. End users can’t buy it yet as Seagate has prioritized Cloud Service Providers (CSP) and hyperscalers.

The drive uses ten HAMR-infused platters of 3.2TB each and exists as an SMR device, which means that it will not be compatible with mainstream hardware (NAS, Desktop PC etc).I explained here why you won’t be able to buy a 26TB HDD anytime soon or even use one.

We don’t know what the pricing is yet but I expect it to cost about $700 when it goes on sale on popular online retailers onBlack Friday 2024.

Now, if you want to buy the biggest hard disk drive right now and don’t want to wait for the aforementioned 32TB drive to land, thenSeagate has a 24TB hard drive on sale for just under $400. TheIronWolf Pro Enterprise SATA HDDis a NAS-focussed HDD but will be more adequate for most use cases. If you prefer Western Digital, the equivalent Red Pro NAS drive sells for just under $570 at the time of writing.

Also present in WD’s sprawling portfolio are 26TB, 27TB, 28TB and 30TB models, part of the Ultrastar DC HC680 range. You can’t buy them direct so you will have to contact WD directly should you want to acquire one. Toshiba confirmed that it will launch 30TB and 32TB models but has not set a launch date.

The largest portable HDD on the market

WD Elements 6TB portable HDD

Hard disk drives are cheap and offer plenty of capacity but they are bound to disappear in a not-so-distant future. Right now, the biggest portable hard disk drive has a capacity of 6TB; meet theWD My Passport 6TBwhich uses a special drive that is slightly bigger than a standard laptop HDD which has a width of 2.5-inch and a height of 7mm.

This one is 12.5mm thick which makes it incompatible with laptops having a 2.5-inch spare bay. Western Digital has many models of that capacity starting from under $153 and spread across multiple categories: the G-Drive ArmorATD, the My Passport (Ultra, For Mac), the WD_BLACK P10, Elements (and Elements SE) and finally Easystore.

Sadly, given the lack of new products, it seems that hard drive manufacturers have given up on portable and laptop hard disk drives altogether. Given that the sweet spot for external HDD capacity is 4TB and with no 7TB 2.5-inch HDDs planned, portable HDDs are likely to disappear rapidly when cheap large, capacity external SSD hit this capacity point and come down in price later this decade.

Largest M.2 SSD

WD_Black SN850X 8TB SSD

I have removed the 15.36TB Teamgroup QX SSD as it has been retired. SATA drives in general are now considered obsolete having been superseded by NVMe models for laptops.

If you want high capacity and high performance, there are seven consumer PCIe x4 Gen 4 SSDs available: theSabrent 8TB Rocket 4 Plus, theWD_black SN850X, theTeamgroup MP44, theInland Performance Plus, theFantom Drives VENOM8and theCorsair MP600 Pro/XT.

They all retail for $800 or more and deliver similar performance (around 7,000MB/sec, 6,100MB/sec for sustained read/write respectively). At the time of writing, there’s no Gen 5 SSD of this capacity or indeed, any widely available PCIe SSDs with a larger capacity.

For this category, I chose the WD_BLACK SN850P because, at the time of writing, it is the cheapest of the lot.

Largest removable storage

Quantum LTO-8 12TB tape

SSDs tend to get the limelight when it comes to storage technology but the sobering reality is that a lot of data worldwide is archived and lives in cold storage, media that requires hours, if not days before it is accessible. Enter tape or more specificallyLTO(Linear Tape-Open), a tape technology currently in its 9th iteration that offers up to 18TB capacity on a data cartridge and up to 45TB compressed.

Tape though comes with many caveats; the average price of the drives is exorbitant - in the thousands of dollars. It is a linear storage technology which means that it can take time to retrieve the data stored but it works great for backup and is popular with cloud storage providers.

However, if your data requirements are in the petabytes and you care more about archival than immediate access, then tape can be a pretty compelling alternative.

I would choose the previous generation though, LTO-8 for my archival needs, as it offers a much better cost-to-capacity ratio than LTO-9. A 12TB tape for as little as $61 or just over $5 per TB. It offers native transfer speed rates of 360MBps and supports 256-bit AES encryption by default.

A quick back-of-the-napkin calculation shows that you are likely to break even at around 500TB. 40 tapes (about $2400) and aUSB 3.0 tape drive(about $5100) will cost you roughly the same as 25 external 20TB HDD (at $280 a piece), as of October 2024.

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Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled inwebsite buildersandweb hostingwhen DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.

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