RAM may be abominably expensive, but hey, at least SSD prices are also exploding

PC hardware's wintertime of discontent gets worse

As we stumble into what progressively looks similar a hardware-unfriendly 2026, RAMnarök shows nary signs of petering out. As tech giants proceed hoarding representation chips to physique their AI farms, and suppliers gleefully jack up their prices successful turn, consumer-grade RAM is inactive laughably costly – and SSDs, astir of which besides request these in-demand chips, are seeing immoderate nasty ostentation arsenic well.

I bring this up now, erstwhile retention prices began climbing backmost successful November, due to the fact that the past week has been particularly fucked, vis-à-vis the benignant of SSDs you’d privation successful a modern games PC. Keepa, Amazon-tracking the browser hold I’ve agelong utilized to gauge the honesty of Prime Day and Black Friday deals, makes for grim reading: the 1TB WD Black SN850X presently sits astatine £162, having been £116 connected January 5th, and £85 connected November 5th. Nearly treble the price, successful hardly 2 months.

The Crucial T500, different "recommendable successful different circumstances" PCIe 4.0 drive, offered its 2TB mentation for £140 crossed astir of November. Now it’s £240, having climbed adjacent further from the £193 it outgo earlier successful January. The closest happening to an upside present is that the T500 volition soon beryllium enactment retired of its misery, the full Crucial marque being sacrificed to assistance grow the AI bubble that made its retention and RAM truthful unaffordable successful the archetypal place.

And it’s not conscionable NVMe SSDs, arsenic the ol' SATA-based Samsung 870 Evo 1TB has climbed from £83 successful November, to £110 successful December, to £140 close now. You cognize something’s gone incorrect erstwhile you can’t adjacent crook to outmoded tech similar SATA drives to debar the bite. DRAMless SSDs aren’t reliable alternatives either, contempt their defining omission – a DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) cache, built utilizing the precise representation chips that are successful specified abbreviated proviso – logically making them much resistant to proviso issues. Yet the DRAMless Samsung 990 Evo, successful its 2TB capacity, is going for £233, astir a 100 quid much than its December terms of £144.

Again, there’s nary denotation that prices volition self-right immoderate clip soon; adjacent if the proviso of DRAM chips increases, they’re much apt to extremity up successful different Big Tech warehouse than successful your location desktop. Not counting microSD cards for handhelds, that lone leaves – urgh – mechanical hard drives arsenic the economically sensible prime for upgrading your PC’s storage. And, arsenic anyone who’s tried to tally Starfield connected 1 volition archer you, they’re not overmuch of an upgrade astatine all.