This holiday season is a great time to pick up hard drives at a competitive price.  With the pending death of the Chia crypto and far less mining in general, components and hard drive prices have come back down to earth.  Always buy new and always buy from authorized dealers.  The Seagate X18 18TB drive is currently selling on Amazon for $299.  This is a great price that will likely creep back up as Seagate has said it's cutting back production.  The Toshiba 12TB N300 is currently price at $215 and the Wester Digital / Hitachi  Ultrastar stars are still priced at a premium but far more competitive than earlier in the year.  So if you need to upgrade your NAS or video editing DAS, or just need to add a big ass drive to your rack, now is the time.  We recently picked up some X18 18TB drives and really like the performance, around 260Mbps sustained data transfers.  The drives are near silent apart from initial startup.  

Our hard drives recommendations are to stick with enterprise level drives or at least NAS level.  So that includes Seagate Exos, Western Digital Gold and Ultrastar and Toshiba MG and N300 Drives.  We also advise only buying CMR drives  in the 12TB to 18TB capacities for maximum performance and value.  

See our previous article and recommendations for hard drives and video editing.