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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 the best SSD and best hard drive, benchmarked some of the fastest hard drives and fastest 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.
Despite the current global component crisis, manufacturers have been pushing new storage products out of the door to fulfill the extraordinary demand from hyperscalers like Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
- Largest SSD: 245.76TB Kioxia LC9
- Largest HDD: 36TB Seagate Exos M
- Largest external SSD: 30.72TB Glyph Blackbox Plus
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The largest SSDs and biggest hard drives in 2026
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Over the past 20 years, we've tested hundreds of storage devices. The evolution in terms of capacity has been extraordinary with hard drives with hundreds of MB making way for models with hundreds of GB and finally SSDs with hundreds of TB.
We looked for the largest SSD and hard drive models and brought together our top picks in every category below. Note that we've only accounted for those that can be purchased, rather than those that have just been announced.
The largest SSD on the market
The Solidigm D5-P5336 (SBFPF2BV0P12OP1), the biggest SSD on sale right now. Like all other drives of this size, it is aimed at the exploding data centre market with AI being the main catalyst.
Unlike the drive it replaces, the D5-P5336 is widely available and it retails for around $48,400 at the time of writing. That is less than $400 per TB and a 4X price increase compared to just a few months ago. Blame AI and the hyperscalers for that; to make matters worse, while you can technically buy them, expect long lead times. One retailer quoted, ahem, a 12-month wait.
The P5336 is significantly faster, by an order of magnitude, than its ExaDrive rival SSD with a PCIe Gen4 interface and speeds of up to 7GBps (read) and 3GBps (write). It is available in E1.L and U2 form factors only and has an endurance of up to 134.3 Petabytes Written (that's equivalent to the drive being rewritten more than 1000x over five years).
Other 122.88TB SSDs include models from Micron (6600 ion) Dapustor (J5060), Kioxia (LC9), Sandisk (SN670), Innodisk, Phison (Pascari D200V, Pascari D205V, a PCIe 5.0 part) and Samsung (BM1743).
I have not added DFM (Direct Flash Modules) from PureStorage (AKA EverPure) (up to 300TB in 2026) to this list as they are proprietary solutions that can't be used elsewhere. Like Everpure (formerly known as Pure Storage), Huawei has a bespoke 128TB SSD that can only be used in its OceanStor Pacific 9950.
Note that the largest SSD right now is the 245.88TB Kioxia LC9. Sadly, you won't be able to purchase it for the foreseeable future. SK Hynix and Sandisk are also expected to launch similar capacity drives in 2026.
Largest portable SSD
Glyph shocked me a few weeks ago with the launch of a 30.72TB external SSD. The Blackbox Plus U.2 External SSD doesn't come cheap at $10,800 but the premium is largely justified by the fact that it is not a normal M2 SSD shoved in a portable enclosure.
Indeed, this is a U.2 class SSD, a format I associate with data centres and rack servers. How Glyph managed to engineer such a drive, I might ask them one day. And it is not cheap. A single 30.72TB drive costs about $11,354.
Just bear in mind that this still requires an external power supply despite being powered by a USB port with Thunderbolt 3 compatibility. It is not bus-powered.
Glyph says that it will reach up to 1GBps in read/write and its rubber-wrapped aluminum shell also acts as a heatsink. It is a rugged drive but is not IP-rated (so don't dunk it in a bucket of water).
Every Glyph drive comes with a 3-2-1 warranty. Three years of full hardware coverage, including the cables, two years of Level-1 data recovery, and one year of advanced replacement.
Glyph has smaller capacities (7.68TB and 15.36TB) available for $1,400 and $5,500, respectively from specialist retailers.
Honorable external 16TB SSD mentions include:
The largest HDD on the market
As of June 2026, the largest hard disk drives released have a capacity of 40TB. WD announced an unknown SKU in February 2026 while rivals Seagate crossed that bridge in 2025. Both confirmed that drives have been sent to customers but won't be available to end users for the foreseeable future.
Seagate added the Exos M (ST36000NM003K) 36TB hard disk drive to its Exos Mozaic 3+ range and has talked about future hard drives reaching 150TB. End users can't buy those yet as Seagate has prioritized Cloud Service Providers (CSP) and hyperscalers.
The new drives use ten HAMR-infused platters of 3.6TB each and should be compatible with existing hardware. We don't know what the pricing is yet but I expect it to cost about $800 should it ever go on sale on popular online retailers. Note that it pops up online from time to time as refurbished models.
Now, if you want to buy the biggest hard disk drive right now and don't want to wait, then Seagate has a 30TB Exos M drive for just under $1200.
Looking instead for a desktop hard drive, you're out of luck. We haven't been able to find any stock of the popular 28TB external hard drive, the Expansion STKP28000400 that was on sale for under $400 just a few months ago.
Now the highest capacity external hard drive I can buy from Amazon is a 22TB Expansion model, retailing for $530 or about $24 per TB.
Rivals to Seagate are few. In WD's sprawling portfolio are 28TB, 30TB and 32TB models, part of the Ultrastar DC HC680/HC690 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
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 the WD My Passport 6TB. It uses a special drive that is slightly bigger than a standard laptop HDD. So don't even think of removing it.
Western Digital has many models of that capacity starting from under $230 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 SSDs hit this capacity point and come down in price later this decade.
Largest M.2 SSD
16TB PCIe M2 SSDs have been in the pipeline for a couple of years already and while there are no technical obstacles to getting these over the line, the current level of volatility in the global tech supply ecosystem means that it is unlikely to happen.
Instead, enterprise products are prioritized because of higher margins. Hence 8TB SSDs will be the norm for the foreseeable future.
If you want high capacity and high performance, there are consumer PCIe SSDs available for purchase:
- (PCIe 5.0) Samsung SSD 9100 Pro
- (PCIe 5.0) WD_Black SN8100
- (PCIe 4.0) XPG/Adata 8TB Gammix S70 Blade
- (PCIe 4.0) KingSpec XG7000
- (PCIe 4.0) Lexar NM790 /
PLAY - (PCIe 4.0) Sabrent 8TB Rocket 4 Plus
- (PCIe 4.0) WD_black SN850X and SN850P
- (PCIe 4.0) Teamgroup MP44
- (PCIe 4.0) Inland Performance Plus
(PCIe 4.0)Fantom Drives VENOM8- (PCIe 4.0) Corsair MP600 Pro LPX/XT
I am not considering the Samsung 870 QVO as it is a SATA model. They all retail for anything between $1,300 and $2,400 or more and the faster PCIe 5.0 models (two at the time of writing) deliver similar performance (up to 14,800MB/sec sustained read/write).
For this category, I chose the WD_BLACK SN8100 because, at the time of writing, it is the cheaper PCIe 5.0 SSD.
Largest removable storage
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 specifically LTO (Linear Tape-Open), a tape technology currently in its 10th iteration that offers up to 30TB capacity on a data cartridge and up to 75TB 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.
LTO-10 tape has an obscenely expensive price tag; $265 for an HPE one. That is almost 50% more expensive compared to the previous gen LTO-9, still available at a very decent $90 (or $5 per TB).
That said, LTO-9 drives still carry a significant premium and therefore, I would still choose the previous generation LTO-8 for my archival needs. A 12TB tape for as little as $65 or just over $5 per TB. It offers native transfer speed rates of 400MBps and supports 256-bit AES encryption by default.
