Your Old Hard Drives Are About To Be Far More Valuable For A Terrifying Reason

If you have a few hard drives lying around that you haven't used in years, it might be time to bring those back into your workflow because the price of hard drives is increasing. Unsurprisingly, it has everything to do with AI. According to reports, some HDD models have become 40% to 60% costlier in the past few months. This price surge is fueled by the massive demand for storage, particularly in data centers and enterprise setups.

In the past year, we have witnessed a price rise across many PC components like memory, GPUs, and SSDs. However, hard drives (aka HDDs) were largely unaffected because they're considered old technology since modern SSDs deliver far better performance. But there's one thing HDDs excel at: storing vast amounts of data cheaply. Because of this, they're finding increasing applications, especially as the price gap between HDDs and SSDs is widening.

Companies in the AI and cloud space industries are buying storage drives in huge quantities. That affects both availability and prices. At this point, your old hard drives have suddenly become valuable, not just as backup options but even as primary storage solutions at home because it will take a long time time before this demand for hardware stabilizes.

Western Digital, one of the leading storage drive manufacturers, is already sold out of hard drives for 2026. During the Q2 2026 earnings call, Western Digital's CEO Irving Tan said, "We're pretty much sold out for calendar 2026. We have firm POs with our top seven customers. And we've also established LTAs with two of them for calendar 2027 and one of them for calendar 2028," according to the transcript published by Investing.com.

So, companies are locking in massive orders years in advance, signing long-term contracts and sales agreements. While this is primarily limited to large enterprises, retail customers may face the brunt in the form of increased prices and fewer choices. Higher-capacity storage drives may become even costlier for everyday users and small businesses.

Until a year or two ago, there were talks about HDDs being phased out; but with the growing demand for cost-effective storage, hard drives are back at the top of the game. The mechanical drives that used to collect dust in closets are about to become useful and valuable all over again.

This isn't just about storage drives, either. Graphics cards, RAM, and SSDs have all seen price hikes in the recent past; and for the same reason. Companies setting up data centers are also investing in GPUs and memory because these are just as critical to the setup. As a result, the prices of all major PC-related components are rising. Whether you are building a PC from scratch or upgrading its hardware, you will end up paying more as everyday items are becoming costlier due to data centers.

That doesn't mean that you should indefinitely defer storage upgrades. The right approach is to monitor the prices for a while and then make a decision based on requirements. If you already have storage drives, perhaps it would be wise to put them into use as backups instead of getting faster ones right now because the days of cheap backup storage might be coming to an end.