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

As we stumble into what increasingly looks like a hardware-unfriendly 2026, RAMnarök shows no signs of petering out. As tech giants continue hoarding memory chips to build their AI farms, and suppliers gleefully jack up their prices in turn, consumer-grade RAM is still laughably expensive – and SSDs, most of which also need these in-demand chips, are seeing some nasty inflation as well.

I bring this up now, when storage prices began climbing back in November, because the past week has been particularly fucked, vis-à-vis the kind of SSDs you’d want in a modern games PC. Keepa, Amazon-tracking the browser extension I’ve long used to gauge the honesty of Prime Day and Black Friday deals, makes for grim reading: the 1TB WD Black SN850X currently sits at £162, having been £116 on January 5th, and £85 on November 5th. Nearly double the price, in barely two months.

The Crucial T500, another “recommendable in other circumstances” PCIe 4.0 drive, offered its 2TB version for £140 across most of November. Now it’s £240, having climbed even further from the £193 it cost earlier in January. The closest thing to an upside here is that the T500 will shortly be put out of its misery, the entire Crucial brand being sacrificed to help expand the AI bubble that made its storage and RAM so unaffordable in the first place.

And it’s not just NVMe SSDs, as the ol’ SATA-based Samsung 870 Evo 1TB has climbed from £83 in November, to £110 in December, to £140 right now. You know something’s gone wrong when you can’t even turn to outmoded tech like SATA drives to avoid the bite. DRAMless SSDs aren’t reliable alternatives either, despite their defining omission – a DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) cache, built using the very memory chips that are in such short supply – logically making them more resistant to supply issues. Yet the DRAMless Samsung 990 Evo, in its 2TB capacity, is going for £233, almost a hundred quid more than its December price of £144.

Again, there’s no indication that prices will self-right any time soon; even if the supply of DRAM chips increases, they’re more likely to end up in another Big Tech warehouse than in your home desktop. Not counting microSD cards for handhelds, that only leaves – urgh – mechanical hard drives as the economically sensible choice for upgrading your PC’s storage. And, as anyone who’s tried to run Starfield on one will tell you, they’re not much of an upgrade at all.