At this point, it's not surprising to see outrageous prices tacked onto PC memory. It's been several months now since DDR5 RAM became unaffordable for the vast majority of buyers, and older DDR4 RAM, suddenly a lot more popular as DDR5 stock dried up, has also seen some significant price increases.
Unfortunately, solid-state and hard-disk drives are already falling victim to similar supply chain shortages and price hikes.
Buy a new SSD now, or wait who knows how long for prices to come down
I know that a lot of PC enthusiasts are wishing they'd invested in DDR5 RAM before the shortage really got bad. With SSD prices threatening to join RAM in the stratosphere, I thought it might be a good idea to remind you that there's still time to buff your storage setup before things really get out of hand.
As it currently stands, high-performance SSDs in large capacities are already too far gone for many buyers.
Last week, our friends at Tom's Hardware published findings demonstrating that 8TB NVMe SSDs now cost as much or more than the same weight in gold. Drives with half as much capacity will soon reach the same milestone if prices keep climbing, and there's no reason to think that they won't.
Micron recently announced it was ending its run of Crucial consumer storage, delivering a massive blow to the industry. It might not be the last, because there's a lot more money to be made selling to AI firms.
That's the sick part of all of this. We really don't know when the hardware shortages will finish, nor do we know in what manner they'll come to an end. Will it be an AI bubble popping? Will it be manufacturers ramping up NAND and DRAM production quicker than expected? No one really knows.
I wish I'd stocked up on memory to get me through the lean years; alas, I'm not making the same mistake with storage. To help you save some money, I found some of the best prices still available per gigabyte on M.2 and SATA storage.
Storage prices are moving quickly, and I plan to update this list frequently.
Do you agree that storage is heading down the same route as memory? Do you see any way this it won't? Let us know in the comments section!
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