New website helps you find the cheapest storage by cost per gigabyte

[Skye Jacobs]

First look: Jon Levesque, a former executive at Microsoft and DocuSign, has launched a new project that takes a data-driven approach to storage shopping. His website, BuyPerUnit.com, organizes drives purely by how much capacity you get for your money. Rather than highlighting brand names or marketing claims, the platform lists storage products – SSDs, HDDs, SD cards, and USB drives – by their price per gigabyte or per terabyte.

The idea emerged from Levesque's own frustration while sourcing hard drives in bulk. Traditional online retailers emphasize total price, but that metric can obscure how much actual storage value a user receives.

BuyPerUnit flips the logic: the lower the per-unit cost, the better the deal. The current catalog includes more than 300 hard drives and SSDs, along with dozens of SD and USB options. Users can filter by size, form factor, or price unit, then click through to the retailer to complete the purchase.

For now, the platform is labeled a "rough V1." Rather than paying for automated retail APIs, the site scrapes prices from major outlets, including Amazon and Best Buy – a method that reduces overhead but introduces inefficiencies. The interface is intentionally barebones, focused on transparent data display rather than design flourish.

From a technical standpoint, BuyPerUnit offers a clear view of value but does not evaluate performance metrics. Enthusiasts looking for details such as read/write throughput, NAND type, or interface protocols still need to manually compare manufacturer data. That absence leaves room for refinement, particularly as the PC storage market continues to shift amid fluctuating supply and pricing conditions.

Levesque notes that user feedback is shaping the product roadmap. Future updates could include better separation between solid-state and mechanical drives, more granular specification filters, and broader support for memory modules. Competing price aggregators, such as DiskPrices.com, already refresh listings frequently – every four hours in its case – but typically draw from a single retailer. BuyPerUnit aims to cast a wider net, even in its alpha state.

Despite the early build, the utility is apparent. The storage market remains fragmented, and for anyone comparing options across retailers, a per-unit view brings rare transparency. It does not reinvent storage shopping so much as simplify it, distilling a noisy marketplace into one empirical metric: cost per byte.

Permalink to story:

New website helps you find the cheapest storage by cost per gigabyte

 

[J95qRP7]

I would have to believe that most people do not look for storage, using the only metric of cost per GB. Even looking at it from a SATA connection. You can get 8TB SATA SSD or 30+TB HDD. These are completely different segments. Now if you are limited to SATA and your workload requires a lot of writes, you are much better of with a TLC SATA SSD than a QLD SATA SSD, even at the slow SATA bus speed.

This seems like such a crude website, you'd just be better of find the performance metric you're after and search from there.

 

[Kirby1]

Pcpartpicker.com already does this

 

[RaXelliX]

Good idea, but not everyone can and wants to shop by price per/GB alone.
It's because this approach has several flaws.

1. The products with the lowest price per/GB may be the most expensive ones and thus be out the price range.
2. The products with the lowest price per/GB may be too small in capacity and thus be unsuitable.
3. The products with the lowest price per/GB may be the wrong performance tier for the users needs and thus be too slow.

Personally I never shop by using price per/GB. I always shop with a price limit in mind.
What is my total budget. What is the most capacity and the best speed I can get within my budget.

Sometimes I also knowingly exclude a certain manufacturers products because it's OEM, unknown or just has a poor reliability track record. Sometimes I exclude a product because it lacks the necessary interface or form factor.

Dumbing it down all to just price per/GB loses all that nuance.