Price (trend) is a sparkline of recorded prices, newest on the right — green falling, red rising. Expand a row for the full chart with low / high. Some rows carry reconstructed 2024–25 points from that era's $/TB bands; new snapshots are appended weekly and on request.
CMR vs SMR is the trap. Shingled (SMR) drives collapse under sustained writes and RAID / ZFS rebuilds. Every 3.5" BarraCuda 2–8 TB, current SkyHawk 2–8 TB, WD Blue EZAZ 4/6 TB, Toshiba P300 4/6 TB and all consumer 2.5" drives are SMR — and the box doesn't say. CMR only filter on by habit for NAS.
Best $/TB is usually shucking an external (Expansion / Elements / My Book) or an enterprise Exos / Ultrastar / MG-series — the 8 TB NAS and surveillance tier is the worst value.
Workload rating (TB/yr) and MTBF are vendor figures; consumer lines that publish nothing show placeholders (55 TB/yr, 1M h).