SSD and Hard Disk Price: Amazon vs Croma, September 2026 Compared

Storage is unusual on the Indian internet: the headline specification is a plain number, printed in the title, on every listing. So on 14 September 2026 we read 67 listings on amazon.in and 61 on croma.com and divided every one of them by the capacity it claims. Sixty-three Amazon listings and sixty Croma listings state one.

The medians come out a long way apart. Amazon: Rs. 19.43 per gigabyte. Croma: Rs. 12.88. That gap is almost entirely about what each shop stocks rather than what it charges. Croma's hard-drive shelf goes up to 5TB and Amazon's read topped out at 2TB; Amazon's memory-card shelf is full of 8GB, 16GB and 32GB tiles that Croma does not sell at all, and small cards are the most expensive storage there is per gigabyte.

Strip the size difference out and the two shops are startlingly close. On solid state — where both stock the same capacities from the same brands — the medians are Rs. 17.08 per GB at Amazon and Rs. 17.09 at Croma. One paisa, across thirty listings.

Read by format, the two shelves swap the lead twice. Croma is cheaper per gigabyte on hard drives and on memory cards; Amazon is cheaper on pen drives; on SSDs they are indistinguishable.

The hard-drive gap is the big one and it is a stocking decision. Croma's eighteen hard-drive listings include four 5TB drives and five 4TB drives, and the cheapest gigabyte in either read is a WD My Passport 5TB at Rs. 14,749, which is Rs. 2.88 per GB. Nothing in the Amazon read goes above 2TB, so its cheapest rate is Rs. 4.05 on an unbranded 1TB drive — 41 percent dearer per gigabyte than Croma's biggest.

The memory-card gap runs the same way for the opposite reason. Croma's nine cards are all 32GB and up and mostly SanDisk Extreme; Amazon's twenty-two include 8GB cards at Rs. 387 and Rs. 1,499. Those tiny tiles are what pull Amazon's card median to Rs. 29.56 against Croma's Rs. 14.83, and they are a trap on either shelf.

Comparing medians is only half the job, because the two shops stock different catalogues. So we looked for models that appear on both, and there are fewer than you would expect: 35 of Croma's 61 listings are SanDisk, and its pen-drive shelf is almost entirely one brand.

Where a genuine match exists the prices are close and Croma is usually the cheaper of the two. A SanDisk Ultra 128GB USB 3.0 pen drive is Rs. 1,600 on Amazon and Rs. 1,599 at Croma — a rupee. A SanDisk Extreme 1TB USB-C portable SSD is Rs. 19,999 on Amazon and Rs. 18,429 on the cheapest of Croma's three listings for it, a Rs. 1,570 gap.

Two pairs in the table below are not like-for-like and are marked as such. The HP pen drives are different sub-models (819w against 818w) and the SanDisk Extreme cards are different ranges (Extreme GO against Extreme). We have left them in because they show how easily a comparison goes wrong on this aisle: two products with almost the same name can be Rs. 2,170 apart for reasons that have nothing to do with which shop you are in.

Every rung of this ladder is the same rule: the bigger the drive, the less each gigabyte costs. It holds without exception across both reads and all four formats, and it is the single most useful thing on this page.

The practical version: Rs. 14,749 buys 5TB at Croma; Rs. 14,499 buys 1TB on Amazon. Those are two purchases at almost identical money, five times apart on capacity, because one is a spinning drive at the top of its range and the other is a solid-state drive at the bottom of its. If you need speed, the SSD is the right buy and the arithmetic is irrelevant; if you need somewhere to keep photographs, it is the whole story.

Neither shelf holds one price for one product. At Croma the SanDisk Extreme 1TB portable SSD appears three times at Rs. 18,429 and Rs. 19,999, and the 2TB version three times between Rs. 28,649 and Rs. 33,999 — an 18.7 percent spread on the same drive, in the same shop, on the same afternoon. Three Seagate One Touch 5TB listings ran Rs. 19,849 to Rs. 20,649.

Amazon does it differently: there, three separate 1TB drives all sold at exactly Rs. 14,499 — an EVM NVMe, a Crucial X9 portable and an Amazon Basics SATA — each printing a different MRP above it (Rs. 18,999, Rs. 18,000 and Rs. 18,699). Same price, three list prices, three badges.

The habit that follows from both is the same one. Search the product name, scroll past the first result, and check whether the shop is listing it more than once.

The two shops print list prices very differently at the extremes and almost identically in the middle. Median badge: 37 percent on Amazon, 34 percent at Croma. Listings printing an MRP three times the selling price or more: four of 67 on Amazon, four of 61 at Croma.

The extremes are where they part. Amazon's deepest is an HP 128GB pen drive at Rs. 1,243 against a Rs. 5,999 MRP, a 4.8x multiple. Croma's deepest is a SanDisk iXpand 64GB pen drive at Rs. 434 against a Rs. 6,000 MRP — 13.8x, the largest list-price multiple we have seen on a storage listing anywhere. Its E62 Creator 2TB SSD prints Rs. 1,50,500 against Rs. 40,999.

The evidence gap runs the other way and it is wide. Amazon publishes a star average and a rating count on 66 of its 67 listings, several of them in five figures — 85,145 on one pen drive, 81,966 on one SSD. Croma published a star average on 19 of 61 and a rating count on none at all. A '5.0' with no number behind it, which is what three of Croma's drives show, tells you nothing about how many people that represents.

• Divide by the capacity before anything else. Across both reads the rate ran from Rs. 2.88 to Rs. 187.38 a gigabyte. No other number on either shelf separates a good buy from a bad one that cleanly.
• Go to Croma for big spinning drives. It stocks 4TB and 5TB where the Amazon read stopped at 2TB, and those are the cheapest gigabytes in either shop — Rs. 2.88 on a 5TB against Rs. 4.05 on Amazon's cheapest 1TB.
• Never buy a small memory card if the device takes a larger one. Amazon's card median is Rs. 29.56 per GB against Croma's Rs. 14.83, and the whole difference is 8GB, 16GB and 32GB tiles. An 8GB SD card at Rs. 1,499 on Amazon costs the same as a 128GB pen drive on the same page.
• On SSDs, buy wherever is convenient. The medians were Rs. 17.08 and Rs. 17.09 per gigabyte. Check the specific model rather than the shop — Croma's cheapest SanDisk Extreme 1TB listing undercut Amazon by Rs. 1,570, and its dearest matched it exactly.
• Treat a Croma star with no rating count carefully. Croma showed a number on 19 of 61 listings and never said how many people it came from; Amazon showed both on 66 of 67.