How Best Value Works
When you sort by Best Value on DiskHunt, the ranking weighs eight things together: the last recorded price, how much storage you get, how fast the drive is, how long the warranty lasts, the star rating on Amazon, how many buyers have rated the drive, which type of NAND is inside it, and whether it has a DRAM cache.
The goal is to surface drives that give you the most for what you're spending, not just the cheapest option, and not just the fastest.
Price
The score is based on the price last recorded for each drive. Prices on Amazon change frequently, so the figure shown may be out of date. Always check Amazon for the current price before buying.
Capacity
More storage for the same spend is better, but the relationship isn't perfectly linear. Very large drives are discounted because raw gigabytes matter less once you have enough. A 4 TB drive at half the cost of an 8 TB isn't automatically worse, the score reflects that nuance.
Read Speed
Faster drives rank better, but with diminishing returns. Going from a PCIe Gen 3 NVMe drive to Gen 4 is a real jump. Going from a fast Gen 4 drive to an even faster Gen 5 matters much less. The score uses a logarithmic scale so speed is meaningful without overwhelming everything else, and speed can only ever add to a drive's score: a slower drive gets no boost rather than a mark against it.
Warranty
A longer warranty is a signal of manufacturer confidence and reduces your risk. Each additional year beyond the first gives a small boost to the score. A 5-year warranty drive scores noticeably better than an otherwise identical 1-year drive.
Popularity & Rating
Drives with a higher star rating and a larger number of buyer ratings score slightly better. The rating only starts counting above 3.5 stars, and the buyer count above roughly a thousand ratings, so a drive below either mark simply gets no boost rather than a mark against it. A drive that very few people have rated is harder to evaluate objectively, so the algorithm gives a small edge to options that have been widely purchased. The star rating and buyer count are taken directly from Amazon and updated each time the listing is refreshed.
NAND Type & DRAM Cache
Two hardware details separate drives that look alike on paper. NAND is the flash memory a drive stores your data on, and its cell type counts: TLC earns a small boost and the rarer MLC a slightly larger one, while QLC gives a little back, because it slows down on long writes once its cache fills and is rated for fewer write cycles. A drive with a DRAM cache earns a small boost, and a DRAM-less one gives a little back the same way. Each is worth a few percent at most, so they settle close calls rather than decide the ranking. When a drive's NAND type or cache is unknown, it is neither boosted nor marked down, so an unpublished spec never counts against a drive.
How it comes together
All eight factors are combined into a single number, lower is better. A drive that is well priced, has ample storage, decent speed, a solid warranty, sound NAND and cache hardware, and has been bought and rated by a lot of people will rank above one that wins on only one dimension.
Best Value is the default sort on DiskHunt because it tends to surface the most well-rounded options first. You can always re-sort by capacity, speed, or other criteria if you have a specific priority.