WD External Drive $/TB Stopped Getting Cheaper. Then 2026 Broke the Curve.
ShuckStop's historical dataset gives us a six-year look at WD external-drive shucking prices. The comparable in-stock WD external benchmark bottomed near $15/TB in August 2025, sat around $16.50/TB at the end of 2025, and then rose to about $31.25/TB by the complete month of May 2026.
Data source
This analysis uses ShuckStop's public historical CSV of WD external-drive price observations from 2020-06-23 through 2026-06-09 across Easystore, Elements, and My Book rows.
Why this history matters
ListOfDisks' own first-party tracking starts much later. Our live data is better for current deals, current product matching, alerts, and retailer-by-retailer comparison. ShuckStop's data is different: it is a closed historical benchmark for the shucking era. The headline from that six-year window is simple: WD external-drive $/TB stopped getting cheaper, and then 2026 broke the curve.
How we read the benchmark
For the main public benchmark, we filtered the ShuckStop rows to in-stock Best Buy, B&H, and Newegg observations. We excluded Amazon and eBay from the displayed line so the public benchmark is closer to the tracked-retailer set used by ListOfDisks. We used daily median $/TB, not daily minimum $/TB, because a median benchmark is better for reading the market than a single one-off low.
The cheap plateau broke
On that basis, the series starts in June 2020 at about $20/TB. The cheap period was real, but it was not a straight line down. The yearly benchmark moved around the high teens and low twenties for most of the window, then reached its best full-year reading in 2025 at about $18/TB. The daily benchmark low came on 2025-08-11, at roughly $15.00/TB.
The complete-month break
By December 2025, the monthly median was still about $16.50/TB. That is the end of the cheap plateau. January 2026 moved to about $22/TB. February and March held around $21.67/TB. April moved to about $28/TB. May moved to about $31/TB. That is the key break. The market did not merely stop improving. It repriced upward.
Why June is not the headline
Early June continued the climb, but it should not carry the headline. June has only nine days in the source range and the steepest daily values in the whole dataset. It is useful as a provisional footnote, not as the main proof.
The market context
The broader storage-market context points in the same direction, without proving a one-to-one cause. Goldman Sachs Research supports the buildout backdrop: it projects a sharp rise in US data-center power demand from 2025 to 2027, driven by accelerated AI infrastructure. TrendForce is the stronger storage-pricing source: it reports tight memory supply, AI and data-center demand pushing NAND contract prices higher, NAND capacity shifting toward enterprise SSDs, and major cloud providers using long-term agreements to secure supply. On the hard-drive side, Seagate's 2026 earnings releases describe durable data-center demand and AI-driven data creation supporting sustained storage and exabyte demand.
The consumer read
Taken together, those sources frame ShuckStop's data as a consumer-level view of a broader data-center-led storage-demand story, not proof that any single upstream factor caused WD external prices to rise. The shucking bargain did not disappear in a press release; it showed up as worse $/TB for people watching external WD drives.
Capacity and family notes
Capacity-level history shows why the story feels familiar to people who shucked drives for years. 18TB and 20TB became the strongest parts of the curve during the later cheap period, and both moved higher in 2026 on meaningful partial-year samples. For 18TB, the annual daily-median benchmark was about $16.67/TB in 2023 and about $17.22/TB in 2025; in 2026, through 2026-06-09, it was about $21.67/TB. For 20TB, the benchmark was about $19/TB in 2023, improved to about $17.50/TB in 2025, then moved to about $22/TB in 2026.
Source numbers
Source rows: 62,262. Comparable public-display rows: 26,428. Comparable overall benchmark days: 2,169. Comparable date range: 2020-06-23 through 2026-06-09. December 2025 was $16.50/TB on 68 comparable rows across 31 days; May 2026 was $31.25/TB on 355 rows across 31 days. June 2026 was $40.83/TB on 108 rows across nine days and is treated as partial, not as the headline stat.
Bottom line
The old bargain got worse. The floor held through 2025, then gave way across the full months of early 2026.