ELI5: Why is storage so expensive right now?

Posted by rip-droptire@reddit | buildapc | View on Reddit | 20 comments

I paid $170 for a 2TB Samsung 870 Evo, a very standard SATA SSD, about a year and a half ago. It is now $670. That's absurd.

I haven't been paying attention to the industry all that much and just went storage hunting because I'm close to running out. What caused the spike in SSD prices?

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nemanja694@reddit

Big corpos wants easy money from AI, ai requires massive amounts of rams. They buy all the ram, chip shortage starts, memory manufacturers see lot of green $ so they said fuck the regular customers, make memory almost exclusively for AI data centers and drip feed regular customers, prices gone up naturally because of demand

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notainotbot@reddit

Companies want sell Ai, Ai need hardware.

Companies buy all hardware for Ai. Hardware producers happy to sell to companies. Consumer no hardware left.

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Ok_Sound_5343@reddit

most people say AI, but I say that homelabs are becoming exceedingly more popular. no one wants to pay for netflix, HBO, spotify, books/audiobooks or disney+ subscriptions every month $50 to $100, so a lot of people are building homelabs instead. they are really popular atm.

benefits of homelabs are also that they just work better, are faster, have no limitations, watch whatever whenever and forever, no lag, no ads, etc

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PAPO1990@reddit

The homelab market is nowhere NEAR big enough to influence prices. It's AI. A single datacentre will order more storage in one go than the entire Homelab market would buy in an whole year.

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gnopgnip@reddit

Ai companies have pre ordered all the hard drives and ram and ssds for 2027 and 2028, paying more than consumers would.

Except it’s more like a promise to order it later. They haven’t paid yet. They can’t afford to pay unless they keep growing at incredible rates, In many cases the data centers don’t yet exist either

But for consumer ssds, non Samsung have more reasonable prices

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MinorDissonance@reddit

Bro just woke up from a coma

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rip-droptire@reddit (OP)

I'm not the type to check hardware news all the time. My PC has strong specs from a couple years ago and does what I need it to. No reason to constantly worry about the computer hardware industry if it's not an immediate concern

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MinorDissonance@reddit

Im jk man, so what happened is AI datacentres needed ram. Which caused memory shortage affecting anything that's ram, vram or storage. Even in cars.

As of right now, CPUs are next.

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ChipCob1@reddit

You can put some blame on Papa Trump's tariffs as well. The same drive is £349 in the UK....about 470 US$

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Unknwn_Ent@reddit

You don't need to 'check the news all the time'; bro this has been relatively mainstream news for like a year going on two now. Ever since covid you could argue all computer prices have been inflated, and it's reported CPU's are going to have a shortage next.

Also while I agree 'worrying' about something you don't need or doesn't pertain to you at the moment can make no sense to a degree; it's good to keep up with things generally speaking if you have the ability. Global politics doesn't neccessarily pertain to me, but keeping up with for example the war in Iran made it obvious to me I should buy gas before it spikes in price one last time, and to make purchases of imports before fuel effects the import/transport price. People who 'don't follow politics' are surprised the costs of goods are going up; and to me I knew it was coming weeks before. Same with PC parts.

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Naerven@reddit

Demand for storage increased faster than factories can supply. Demand up, supply low means higher prices

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rip-droptire@reddit (OP)

Sometime in 2028? Yikes. That's a long time to wait when I'm 300GB from running out of space

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Overall-Tailor8949@reddit

Spinning rust (mechanical HDDs) for storage of things you don't need FAST access to, documents, audio files, movies you don't watch regularly but don't want to get rid of. Those prices have gone up as well but not by as high a percentage as SSDs. You can get a 4TB Western Digital Black for under $200

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Howtobefreaky@reddit

AI data centers have caused storage prices to rise, and this is affecting even SSDs. I think Samsungs may be more affected than other brands because they are known for quality SSDs, but there are other brands that have more sane prices than $670. A Team Group 2TB SSD can be got on Newegg for about $250m and similar prices for some M.2 prices. For what its worth, I hvae a Team Group SSD and it works perfectly fine. I will probably even be getting a 4TB one soon, which is $350ish. This isn't to say that these prices are fine and its a shame that one can only pay these prices for either KingSpec or Team Group, but there are other options than paying $670 for a Samsung SSD when other brands are perfectly sufficient.

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rip-droptire@reddit (OP)

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