Nobody wants to compete. I just shared something I use myself, hoping it could help someone else. Of course, to keep it running, I need to make a profit, since the Amazon API alone won't let me discover so many products, and I need to get product info
If users won't find anything useful, I will simply put it offline and run it on demand whenever I need a new drive.
As many users pointed out, neither DiskPrices' idea nor mine is unique; there are many alternatives with different product listings.
It is only a benefit for the users if they have more choice
I've noticed diskprices.com getting increasingly bad with filters, probably because the source data is garbage with Amazon sellers trying to jam all the keywords into titles or descriptions/features..."M.2 USB-C 3.2 PCIE NVME"
The prices don't seem accurate on the ones I checked. Maybe they were a few months ago, but there's been a lot of stock shortages, especially for larger HDDs, and it's been driving up prices.
This should be the price as shown in the product listings for the category.
Perhaps, depending on product availability, you are shown different prices on the product page.
I will take a better look into this, but I can confirm that this data is very recent (about 4-5 hours ago), definitely not months old
It has Amazon as well as many other stores, and several other filtering options. It supports hard drives, SSDs, and other computer parts (everything that you need to build a computer). It also has a compatibility checker if you give it a complete parts list. It also works in several countries.
Man even spinning rust has inflated. In mid 2024 I got a 8TB WD Blue for $115 and now the cheapest 8TB I see on PcPartPicker is $160... isn't that like 30% increase in a year or so? :/
$115 / 8 TB is $14.38/TB. In the last 2 or 3 months there have been drives for far less per TB (closer to $10/TB), but it seems like the sweet spot for the best deals has significantly increased in TB.
These sites all suffer from the same defect, amazon pa-api pricing is NOT consistent in any region with the carted values an end user will be shown. This is a well known thing if you have worked with that api before and you are essentially just dropping the authors 24 hr amz cookie for them to earn off all other sales. Not to say thats bad, but the value add from a price comparison site like this is minimal to the end user as you will very likely not get that shown price.
Unfortunately, this is what I sometimes experience, and I am not sure there's much that can be done. I am already trying to filter out outliers, but if a price looks "plausible", this filtering doesn't do much.
Sometimes I get prices for items that are unavailable or completely off (perhaps from a 3rd-party seller?).
Is this really it? The prices just seem completely wrong from the links I clicked. I can’t imagine the PA-API is really that far off for every product, unless something has changed drastically from the last time I used the API.
These prices are 5-6 hours old.
While working on this site, I noticed that Amazon pricing can be very dynamic.
Moreover, it could be that Amazon is returning the retail price, but because of current availability, once you land on the product page, you are shown prices from a different seller
Yes, I guess I should have done some more due diligence before reinventing the wheel...
Hopefully, I will find some ways to differentiate.
Something I don't see there is a filter by brand or a text search across all fields. I was planning to add these in a next iteration
I haven't needed to buy a spinning hard drive in about 5 years. I have no idea how to choose one any more. There are so many variations. Red, Purple, Blue, Gaming, Enterprise, Business.
The thing that makes the most difference is a drive being CMR vs an SMR one. CMR ones are recommended if you are ever going to write large-ish amounts of data in one go or if you ever plan to make a raid 5/ raid 6 arrays.
SMR drives are now what you find on most consumer drives between with capacities 1<x<8 tb (higher capacities too, but depends on the manufacturer) , they have a CMR area of the platter as a sort of write cache (like slc cache in ssds), while the rest of the platter will be really slow to write to. The write head is wider than the read head, so to overwrite something the drive has to first read and copy somewhere else the data on the track(s) that would be overwritten.
This makes whole drive writes really slow and can kill raid 5/6 since resilvers would take very long, possibly even a month, instead of a few days.
Besides the recording technology, the color of the label and the product line name are mostly marketing and won't make too much of a difference for simple usage.
Fully agree on CMR being the way to go, especially for things like home servers.
The only other value might be the power on hours (POH). Effectively the intended daily running time. If youre looking for something that sits in a server, best pick something with 24h.
Beyond that I think the only other difference is warranty. I know Toshiba gives 5 years on their higher end pro models.
But two of any brands and use ZFS. That’s the easiest (though you can check Backblaze if you want to spend a few hours interpreting data that ultimately won’t matter much).
Anything like this for the Indian market as well? I tried diskprices,terabytedeals & pricepergig (currently the only 3 websites mentioned right now in comments/main post show hn itself) and none of them support Indian services.
If someone does support Indian markets, I have a minor suggestion to include both Amazon and flipkart.
I would honestly really appreciate a quick website I can point out to in my local community so vektor if possible, can you please add it?
Yup don't worry about flipkart if that's the case, but can you please add atleast the amazon.in's suggestion.
Thanks for trying with flipkart as well tho!
But are you able to connect it with amazon.in?
Note, this is painfully out of date, I no longer maintain it.
How did you get the data? I went the scraping route after having difficulty qualifying for access to Amazons API as I didn't generate enough purchases via the affiliate links. Would be interested in hearing how you approached this.
Interesting. Glad there was a drop down to pick a bunch of different sources. I was expecting it to be US central but was happy when I saw I could search for amazon.co.uk
An ability to search for NAS drives, even if it's just a substring search within the product name, would be great.
Also a search on drive speed. I'm not interested in 5400rpm drives, only 7200rpm+.
(I'm looking for a bunch of 7200rpm drives that are NAS rated, so I'm not interested in generic consumer grade 5400rpm drives right now.)
As a backend engineer, I am beyond tired of frontend engineers taking what is a Javascript programming error ("[Uncaught DOMException:] The operation is insecure" is a JS exception. It is most commonly raised when a page wants access to APIs without permission to such) and blaming it on the backend ("500 Internal Server Error" — except this is just a lie. No 500s occurred).
looks like you've made considerable changes since comments; all prices I checked were accurate (while nothing I checked on diskprices was). this looks genuinely helpful as this is something I look into myself by manually looking around, and is clean/easy-to-use; bookmarked it. only thing I might like on top of this is to be able to filter by if renewed or not, though they seem to often have it in the product title.
Not affiliated, but for Germany I'd check https://gh.de ... For technical products you can filter for mostly any relevant detail... At least most German shops are there, and only a few not.
I am always curious why there doesn't seem to be something similar everywhere?
Not to be yet another critical voice, but where are your prices actually coming from? I'm in the US, and I just chose the top three "Price/TB" items and none of the prices on your site agree with the actual item pages on Amazon.
- Toshiba X300 16TB Performance & Gaming 3.5-Inch Internal Hard Drive
- https://terabytedeals.com/us: $229.95
- https://amazon.com/dp/B0CYQXNCVZ: $353.30 new
- Western Digital 18TB WD Red Pro NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD
- https://terabytedeals.com/us: $259.99
- https://amazon.com/dp/B08K3TFM92: $361.53 used, $549.59 new
- Western Digital 22TB WD Purple Pro Surveillance Internal Hard Drive HDD
- https://terabytedeals.com/us: $329.69
- https://amazon.com/dp/B0B5VYRJ6Q: $465.00 new
You can claim Amazon price volatility, but I don't suspect that to be what's going on here. CamelCamelCamel price history graphs show that these items have never been anywhere near the terabytedeals.com prices looking back the last three months, including Amazon, 3rd Party New, or 3rd Party Used prices.
In fact, my spidey senses are tingling. The only strings that match the terabytedeals.com prices are completely different items.
These other items and prices only appear if you choose the "See All Buying Options" button or the "Other sellers on Amazon" menu. Then wait for the "Didn't find what you were looking for? Consider these alternative items" section to load.
- For B0CYQXNCVZ (16TB), Amazon offers https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07NTDWMSQ (6TB) which *IS* listed as $229.95.
- For B08K3TFM92 (18TB), Amazon offers https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CMJPRLJV (18TB) which *IS* listed as $259.99.
- For B0B5VYRJ6Q (22TB), Amazon offers https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0966V6YJB (12TB) which *IS* listed as $329.69.
That this pattern holds true for three items, seems like maybe the wrong prices are being scraped somehow?
US data should now be refreshed.
Prices look much better, but I am still working on product availability.
In some cases the API is returning a price and the only way around that is scraping
That’s because the HTML code is server-side rendered (SSR) with data-theme="dark" hardcoded on the <html> element, so on the initial page load the browser immediately renders with dark mode styles applied. After ± 500ms-600ms Nuxt’s JavaScript hydration kicks in (as this is a Nuxt app based on __NUXT__ at line 11,236), which detects your macOS system preference via prefers-color-scheme media query and updates data-theme to "light".
it shouldn't need to do this. Nuxt has a @nuxtjs/color-mode module which ensures that the correct colour scheme is applied before the browser starts rendering the html.
Apparently the cheapest is £17.75 per TB for a 16 TB disk.
However the second cheapest is £18.75 for an 8, but if you click through the 8 has an option for 16 at £273, which is £17.06. Non-discounted. It's just generally cheaper than the sites suggested cheapest.
So it's unfortunately already demonstrably wrong with its first two suggestions.
> Could someone explain what's SAS and what's the difference between SAS and HDD?
This is like asking what's the difference between JavaScript and React. ish (some hand waving on the analogy)
The question you've asked can't really be answered? Idk what you're asking exactly.
SAS is comparable to SATA. Both can be used for HDDs. For individuals it doesn't really matter. For building huge-ass disk arrays, you might want to use SAS.
ToS are not enforceable if you don't use an official product feed from Amazon in this case. As shown by thousands of companies providing exactly this service for competitor analysis.
i think they mean the ToS for amazon's affiliate link service, which prohibits earning a commission if your site has price history (a few large and old sites have exceptions)
Ah, from the wording ("pull") I assumed you were using the API. You use your own user-agent to access the site(s) and collect prices then? Do you have any trouble getting blocked doing that? Is it some headless chrome controlled programatically?
I have another site that made some qualified sales, so I can use the APIs.
I also played a bit with scraping, and you can do that quite easily, but if you want to do it at some scale, you need lots of proxies, and quite soon it gets slow and overkill
