Seagate produces the largest external hard disk drive on the market, the Expansion or STKP28000400, a 28TB behemoth. You can’t buy it, though and there’s evidence that hyperscalers and businesses are buying all high-capacity drives they can, leaving end users to feed on scraps.
I checked on Seagate, B&H Photo, Best Buy, Amazon, Walmart, Microcenter and Newegg. All of these popular online retailers showed the item as being sold out, without any backorder option. In other words, they don’t know when the 28TB Expansion will be back in stock.
But don’t worry, if you really, really want one, scalpers are here to help at a price. This drive has a retail price of $570 and you could have bought it for $390 in January 2025. 18 months later, scalpers are happy to sell you for about $1,000.
A sign of the times?
Micron sacrificed its consumer-facing brand, Crucial, to divert precious components to the far more lucrative enterprise market and there has been a dearth of new consumer storage announcements as everyone’s attention is where the money is.
Seagate’s own page shows multiple high-capacity hard drives (internal and external) being out of stock, which would imply that stock allocation is patchy at best or weak for the foreseeable future in the direst of scenarios.
The outlook is better at Western Digital, Seagate’s long-time arch-rival. They seem to have an ample stock of the WD Elements 26TB external hard drive, the largest model available from the manufacturer.
You’re in for a shock, though as these are sold – direct from the manufacturer – for $1,390, that’s more than $53 per TB, a 4X increase over average prices just 12 months ago. But there’s worse.
Sold out
Earlier this year, Western Digital, which produces only hard drives (unlike Seagate), confirmed in February that it had completely sold out its HDD capacity for 2026. “And we’ve also established LTAs (Long Term Agreements) with two of them for calendar 2027 and one of them for calendar 2028”.
In other words, buy high-capacity drives while you can, they probably won’t be around for long. We can infer a few things from our observation.
The first obvious one is that prices have shot up by about the same amount, as GPUs and memory. And as for other component categories, it is impacting all SKUs. Prices are going up significantly across all capacities; it is only going up, and not coming down anytime soon.
The voracious, quasi-infinite appetite of hyperscalers and trillion-dollar AI ventures means that demand is significantly outstripping supply, forcing manufacturers to prioritize relevant product lines.
This explains why Seagate’s share price has risen 600% since June 2025, while Western Digital has risen almost 10X over the same period, with others like Intel, AMD, and Broadcom enjoying smaller gains.
- I have reached out to Seagate to get an official statement on how they see the market evolving and will update the article when they reply.
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desire.athow@futurenet.com (Desire Athow)
