TECH NEWS – Admittedly, it’s not only RAM and graphics cards that are becoming more expensive; storage is too.
The 1 TB version of the Lexar NM790 NVMe SSD currently costs $118. However, according to PC Gamer, the same SSD cost only $66 in October. This means its price has nearly doubled in about four months. In fact, according to Camelcamelcamel, which tracks Amazon prices, this SSD was almost $150 last month. Lexar is not the only brand with significant price increases; higher-capacity SSDs have been hit even harder.
The 8TB model of the WD_Black SN850X is currently $1,080 at Newegg, almost double the May price of $590. It’s important to note that these are likely older stock because none of the drives bear SanDisk’s latest branding. The 8TB SSD is no longer available on Amazon; however, a glance at the price tracker shows another significant price increase from November to January.
These are just a few examples, but it’s clear that the SSD sector has also been engulfed by the memory apocalypse. In short, as the AI industry builds more data centers (often in unsuitable climates for the hardware), it will require more system memory, such as DRAM, and more storage devices, such as SSDs. Due to rapid development and huge spending, manufacturing capacity constraints result in memory shortages for everyday people like us. The worst part is that these price increases are not unexpected.
In October, Chen Libai, an Adata representative, noted that most major memory and storage technologies were experiencing shortages for the first time in about 30 years. In November, Khin-Seng Pua, the CEO of Phison, stated in an earnings report that all NAND manufacturers predicted their inventory would be depleted by 2026. Then, in December, Cameron Crandall, a Kingston representative, sounded the alarm about rising SSD prices. He explained that the company had recently seen a 246% increase in NAND chip prices.
So, it would be wise to wait to expand our storage because we would currently have to pay a ridiculous amount for it. And it’s not over yet.
Source: PCGamer
