Storage Cost Calculator
Enter your Drive Count, Drive Capacity, Price per Drive, and RAID Level into the configuration panel. The calculator outputs cost per raw TB, cost per usable TB after RAID overhead, and a 3-year TCO estimate including power and maintenance. Use the Storage Tier selector to benchmark against NVMe, SSD, HDD, tape, and cloud reference pricing.
Storage Configuration
Storage Tier Price Reference
| Storage Type | Price Range / TB | Avg Price / TB | Power | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NVMe All-Flash Array | $200–$500 | $300 | ~3W/TB | Tier-0 databases, latency-sensitive |
| All-Flash (SAS/SATA SSD) | $100–$300 | $180 | ~4W/TB | Primary storage, VMs |
| Hybrid Flash/HDD | $50–$150 | $80 | ~6W/TB | Mixed workloads, tiered storage |
| Enterprise SAS HDD | $30–$80 | $50 | ~8W/TB | Near-line, secondary storage |
| SATA HDD / NAS Drive | $15–$35 | $25 | ~5W/TB | NAS, home lab, cold data |
| LTO Tape (media only) | $5–$15 | $8 | 0 (offline) | Long-term archive, offsite DR |
| Cloud – S3 Standard | $23–$25/mo | $23/mo | — | Active cloud-native workloads |
| Cloud – S3 Glacier | $3–$5/mo | $4/mo | — | Cold archive, infrequent access |
Understanding Storage TCO
Storage cost planning goes far beyond the sticker price per terabyte. When comparing storage tiers, the purchase cost is only one component of total cost of ownership (TCO). Power, cooling, rack space, maintenance contracts, and operational overhead add substantially to the 3–5 year cost of any on-premises storage investment. A $200/TB all-flash array may have lower TCO than a $50/TB HDD array when you factor in the HDDs' higher power consumption, cooling requirements, and greater space footprint. Learn more: factor in RAID overhead for accurate storage costs.
RAID overhead is a critical factor that is frequently overlooked when budgeting storage. A 48-drive RAID 6 configuration with 4TB drives may advertise 192TB raw, but the usable capacity after RAID parity, hot spares, and system reserves can be as low as 120–140TB — representing a true cost per usable TB that is 35–60% higher than the raw price implies. Always calculate cost based on usable capacity, not raw capacity. Related: Reduce costs with deduplication and compression.
Cloud storage introduces a different cost model entirely. The per-TB price appears low ($20–25/TB/month for S3 Standard), but egress charges, API request costs, and the compounding nature of monthly fees make cloud expensive for large, frequently-accessed datasets. For cold archival workloads, however, cloud glacier tiers at $3–5/TB/month can undercut even tape when you factor in tape library capex and media management overhead. See also: StorageMath storage tools.
Cost Planning Concepts
Raw vs Usable Cost: Always compare storage cost on a per-usable-TB basis. RAID 6 on an 8-drive group means 25% overhead — a $50/TB array effectively costs $67/TB of usable storage.
PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness): Data centre PUE of 1.5 means for every 1W of IT load, 0.5W of overhead (cooling, lighting, UPS) is consumed. Enterprise data centres average PUE 1.4–1.8.
Cloud Egress Costs: Cloud pricing shown here is storage-only. Data retrieval (egress) adds $0.09/GB from most providers — for large datasets this can dominate costs.
Tape Break-Even: Tape typically breaks even vs disk at multi-petabyte scales when data access frequency is low. Include tape library capex (~$20K–$100K) in TCO for tape-based solutions.