Unfortunately, all of that doomsaying last year was correct and SSD prices are surging as a result of the memory crisis
The best time to buy an SSD? Yesterday.
(Image credit: Future)
For the last year and a bit, I've sat down every Friday morning to update our guide to the best SSD deals for gaming. Today, I sat down for the first time in 2026, only to see that the memory supply crisis is well and truly having a knock-on effect on SSD pricing.
Our Jeremy has already been keeping an eye on surging PC hardware prices, but this morning presented a more recent example. I just wrote a deal post about the 1 TB version of the Lexar NM790 NVMe SSD which, today, is going for $118. Not terrible, right? Well, that's what I thought until I remembered I had in fact written about the same SSD back in October of last year—when it was only $66.
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These are just a few examples, but it's clear that the realm of SSD now finds itself thoroughly caught up in the memory apocalypse. Long story short, as the AI industry builds more and more data centres (often in ill-advised climes for the hardware inside), it's going to need more and more system memory like DRAM, as well as storage media like SSDs. Moving at a swift clip and throwing a great deal of money around, that means a memory shortage for us normal folk, due to the limitations in manufacturing facilities. Perhaps worst of all, these surging prices are far from wholly unexpected either.
In October, Adata's Chen Libai observed that most major memory and storage technologies were experiencing a shortage for the first time in about 30 years. In November, Phison's CEO Khein-Seng Pua shared in an earnings call that . Then in December, Kingston's Cameron Crandall also sounded the SSD pricing alarm, explaining that .
