The best cheap hard drive deals and prices for October 2024

Seagate Barracude and Firecuda on green background with TechRadar deals text overlay
(Image credit: Future)

With the rise in popularity of the best SSDs, many people have started to write hard drives off as a thing in the past. That’s a mistake – the best hard drives offer huge amounts of storage at prices that SSDs just can’t match. If you have a giant library of music, video or even photos, it’s a good idea to look at a traditional hard drive for all your archival needs.

Regardless of what you need the storage for, nobody wants to pay full price for what is essentially old technology, no matter how useful it is. As with any type of PC hardware, the MSRP is more of a guideline than any kind of firm rule. 

Luckily, we here at TechRadar have combed through hundreds of deals across the internet to find best hard drive deals so you won’t miss the best sales this week.

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Best hard drive deals

Seagate Barracuda

Delivers faster speeds at a lower price

Capacity: 1500GB | Interface: Serial ATA-300 | Warranty: NA

Impressive speed
Affordable price
Durable

Seagate scores the spot for the best hard drive deal, with their BarraCuda drives that strike that perfect balance between storage, speed and price. The 3TB drives in this lineup are an especially great deal, as they really hit that sweet spot between high density storage and a sweet 7,200RPM spin rate. And they do this while maintaining a price that’s significantly lower than their direct competition.

So if you’re looking for a drive for light archiving, or a main drive and you don’t want to take the plunge on an SSD, the BarraCuda will be a great choice, as it can reach read speeds of up to 190 MB/s which is more than enough for day-to-day computing.

Best gaming hard drive deal

WD VelociRaptor

High performance and storage space

Capacity: 300GB | Interface: SATA 3.0Gb/s | Warranty: 2-years

Impressive spinning speed
Offers 1TB of storage space

When it comes to gaming, the biggest priority is speed. Nobody wants to be playing their favorite PC games, only to encounter unbearable loading times. That’s where the WD VelociRaptor drives really shine. These slick drives offer a blistering 10,000 RPM, so that you’ll spend as little time as possible loading, and more time actually playing.

Better yet, they offer much better price-per-gigabyte than even budget SSDs, so if you’re looking to cut down on your downtime, you can do so while still saving a couple bucks.

Best hybrid hard drive deal

Seagate Firecuda Desktop

Solid performance at an affordable price

Capacity: 1TB | Interface: SATA | Warranty: 5-years

Enhanced performance for gamers
Impressive speeds

Hybrid drives combine the best aspects of both SSDs (solid state drives) and hard drives, and allow you have high storage density while also having the speed of an SSD for the data you use the most. The Seagate FireCuda desktop drives take this formula and perfect it by including 2TB of data with 8GB of smart flash memory. That might seem like a small complement of SSD space, but it learns and store which files and applications you use the most, helping you access it faster than a standard HDD. 

And now, with the rising ubiquity of SSDs, there’s never been a better time to find a deal on the FireCuda – as along with other SSHDs, the prices are being cut constantly.

Best laptop hard drive deal

HGST 1TB Travelstar 7K1000

A 1TB Notebook Drive with impressive speed

Capacity: 1TB | Interface: SATA 6.0Gb/s | Warranty: 3-years

Fast transfer speeds
Affordable price
1TB capacity

These days, it’s becoming more and more common for laptops to be built with SSDs. While this is great if you’re not necessarily looking for high amounts of storage, anyone who needs a lot of space to work is going to be stuck paying an extremely high premium. Luckily, the HGST Travelstar solves this issue by offering 1TB of storage with a 7,200 RPM spin rate at a very modest price.

Coming in 750GB and 1TB varieties, the Travelstar is a great deal for anyone who is looking for a great hard drive in their laptop.

Best external hard drive deal

WD Elements Portable

Versatile with impressive storage space

Capacity: 1,000 GB | Interface: USB 3.0 (USB 2.0) | Warranty: 2-years

Large capacity
Low price
Multi-functional

Do you travel for work or school a lot? Well, if so, the WD Elements line of external drives might just be perfect for you. Not only do these drives offer a great price-per-gigabyte level, but they’re small enough to carry along with you without breaking a sweat.

Not only does the WD Elements line offer high storage and high portability, but they also undercut the price of the competition, making it a great purchase for anyone who needs to carry their work with them. 

Alex Whitelock
Deals Editor

Alex is TechRadar's deals editor, specializing in getting our readers the bang bang for the buck on the tech that we know and love. He's a dab hand at covering retailer events like Black Friday and Amazon Prime Day having over seven years of e-commerce experience at Future PLC; including bylines at our sister sites T3 and GamesRadar. Alex's expertise touches on most areas of TechRadar but he has a particular love for phones, laptops, and cameras, being an avid photographer. Outside of work, you'll find him indulging his love for street and travel photography, at home working on music, or down at the local climbing gym.