The manufacturers and data centers

responsible for the ongoing RAM and GPU

shortages and price surges have decided

it's finally time to do the exact same

thing, but this time to SSDs, which have

had a more latent impact. In the data we

compiled from multiple sources, NAND

spot prices in some instances like 512

Gbit TLC supply increased by nearly 9x

in a span of 6 months. That hasn't fully

hit completed consumer device prices

yet, but it's starting to. SSD prices

are skyrocketing for a few reasons.

Partly thanks to data centers. There's

now a hard drive shortage alongside

unforeseen data center flash storage

demand. Manufacturers prioritizing

production of higher margin enterprise

SSDs and some manufacturers

intentionally cutting output amidst the

increasing SSD shortage in order to

protect their profitability, effectively

drying up supply of consumer SSDs. If

that sounds familiar to the DRAM cartel

history piece we ran, it should. It's

the same companies mostly playing the

same games where they know the demand is

up and they've openly stated that

they're prioritizing protecting their

profit rather than meeting demand. And

this happens just as Chinese NAND maker

YMTC came online in a larger way which

helps keep the NAND prices up for

everybody. Since October, the session

averaged for 512 Gbit TLC supply and

increased from $2.70 to over $23 or by

more than 8 1/2x its previously stable

spot price, even surpassing DDR5 16

Gbits recent spot price surges in terms

of percent increase. The average two TB

SATA SSD's price increased from around

$150 in November to $350 currently,

while the average two TB NVME SSD soared

from around $190 to $450 at the time of

writing. And for consumer, Faison, a

NAND controller manufacturer, has

reportedly begun requesting prepayments

on orders. The CEO claims that 8

gigabytes of eMMC or embedded multimedia

card modules rose from quote $1.50 to

$20 last year alone. End quote. And

notes an under 30% fulfillment rate as

reported by Tom's Hardware. Valve says

its Steam Deck is out of stock, quote,

due to memory and storage shortages. End

quote. And previously cited issues with

Steam Machine and Steam Frame pricing

due to memory and storage. A managing

director at Kioxia, the third largest

nan manufacturer with over 14% market

share, told Digital Daily through

Machine Translation, quote, "To be

honest, this year's production is

already sold out." End quote. Similarly,

the CEO of Western Digital, the largest

hard drive manufacturer, disclosed on

its quarter 226 earnings, quote, "We're

pretty much sold out for calendar 2026."

End quote. Attributing 89% of its second

quarter revenue to the cloud segment.

Meanwhile, some manufacturers are

reportedly purposefully constraining

supply amidst the shortage and

prioritizing higher margin enterprise

SSDs over consumer solutions. Chosen Biz

citing Omdia reports quote Samsung

Electronics slightly lowered its NAND

wafer output from 4.9 million last year

to 4.68 million this year. SKHENX's NAND

output is also expected to follow a

similar path from around 1.9 million

last year to 1.7 million this year. End

quote. Reported via Yahoo Finance, City

estimates that quote NAND demand driven

by ICMS and quote or NVIDIA's inference

context memory storage platform for its

server solutions is projected to

represent quote 2.8% of expected global

NAND demand in 2026 and 9.3%

in 2027 end quote meaning that Nvidia

will more than triple the storage needs

of this specific solution as measured

against global NAND demand. And Trend

Force adds quote the surge in NAND flash

demand is structural not temporary. This

trend is fueled by the fast growing

needs for AI storage and hard drive

supply shortages leading CSPs to

reallocate orders to enterprise SSDs.

End quote. Kingston data center SSD

business manager noticing early market

indicators commented on the situation

back in December to say this.

>> There has been a little bit of a delayed

reaction. Um, but I I I think that, you

know, you know, come, you know, January,

February, um, I I think it's going to be

very well known across the board that

SSD prices have significantly increased.

>> Luckily, Nvidia CEO Jensen Juan recently

detailed precisely why we're seeing

these sudden price surges, explaining.

>> And and so I I think the the the fact

that everything is scarce

is fantastic for us.

>> That's right. Everything being scarce is

fantastic for not just Nvidia, but the

companies that make the DRAM and now, as

we're talking about today, the flash

memory supply. We brought you this video

with our GN tabletop gaming dice over on

store.gamersacess.net.

The two GN dice kits include one with

e-waste inductors embedded within the

sharp edge resin dice and the other with

embedded and fully custom snowflake

thecat miniatures. The kits include a

D20, D12, D%, D10, D8, D6, and D4 die.

All shipping within a fully custom

wooden box shaped like a D20 and marked

with a GN Alchemy logo on the lid.

Flipping the lid over reveals a roll

tray and the dice. Each kit also

includes a treasure generator card

matched to roll results that I

personally wrote, plus a playing card

matched to the theme of the dice. The

inductor dice have a technopunk goblin

creature token that Andrew on the team

made in Blender. And the snowflake dice

include a snowflake the cat MTG style

card with art drawn by my mom. We

carefully matched the color scheme of

the dice number colors to the inductors

and cats embedded within them. And we

even benchmarked the dice. Actually, so

did Snowflake. She rolled them a few

times, finding that the embedded objects

didn't meaningfully change the roll

results for casual play. Support us

directly and grab a highquality dice kit

available in both autographed and

regular at the link in the description

below. Thanks for your help. SSD price

increases from nan flash supply

increases are undergoing the same type

of thing that system memory is. RAM DRAM

that we detailed in our RAM what the

video from November of last year.

We'll kick off with a quick look at NAND

supply spot prices. We'll compare that

to DDR5 and DDR4 spot prices including

multipliers and the absolute price

changes. And then we'll review

individual SSD prices, just a couple of

them for each category, plus a look at

YMTC supplied SSD prices as well because

they're kind of they're new in theory.

they might pace at a different

multiplier than some of the more known

suppliers and then we'll get into

discussing the factors that are

contributing to the mayhem in more

depth. But some basics first. In

contrast to DRAM, which is volatile

storage, NAND flash is nonvolatile. The

difference is that volatile storage

loses retained information with power

loss, whereas nonvolatile storage

persists without a power source for an

extended period of time. However,

despite their different uses, there are

a lot of parallels to DRAM and to flash

storage solutions. And one of those

parallels is where it comes from. The

actual produced wafers largely come from

the same manufacturers. There are some

differences, but for the most part, it's

a familiar group. Samsung, Micron, and

SKHENX, who control a collective 93% of

the DRAM market, also hold a combined

62.9% of the NAND flash market. Kioxia,

formerly Toshiba Memory, SanDisk, and

Chinese newcomer YMTC, make up the

remaining 37 or so percent share,

according to TrendForce and Counterpoint

Researches most recent publicly

available market share data by revenue.

Another characteristic that both markets

share is their pricing. Typically

following a cyclical pattern, meaning

prices for each new DRM or NAND

generation usually peak early in the

product lifetime and gradually decrease

over time, as seen in this long-term

trend of DRM spot prices, shared by

Jukan on Twitter. This current demand

influx is what's creating some of the

abnormal pricing waves where it's

actually consistently increasing right

now despite cyclical data suggesting

that it should be decreasing right about

now. And this is indicated well by the

512 Gbit TLC spot prices on the market

in a price history chart shared by Mr.

MPFR on Reddit, which compiles data from

other sources like DRAM Exchange. This

chart plots the spot price session

averages from July 2025 to March 2026

for DDR5 16 Gbit, 512 GB TLC, and DDR4

16 Gbit. For reference, there are eight

bits in a bite. We collected this data

using internet archive to compile a

brief spot price history as updated on

dramchange.com. These are supply costs.

Contract prices for manufacturers are

often different like say Apple. But spot

prices give us an idea for upstream

supply chain pricing. DDR5 16 Gbit

session average skyrocketed from under

$10 in October to over $25 by the end of

November. Then it exceeded $30 in early

January and surpassed $35. Heading into

February, now it's approaching $40 spot.

The spot price for DDR516 Gbit at lower

speeds has gone up by at least 6 to 6.7x

since late August last year. As we

already know from prior videos, the end

result is that a lot of the most common

kits of memory have multiplied in price

upwards of 5x or more in just as many

months. 512 GB TLC or triple level

cell/nand spot prices were around $2.50

to $3 or so until October. Since

November, the 512 GB TLC session average

has increased by around $5 or so monthly

up to its current $23 session average.

Now, 512 GB is 64 GB. So, if you have

multiple 512 GB TLC solutions in a

single SSD to form a say two TB disc or

4 TB disc, then that'll affect you

disproportionately as you add more and

more of these uh modules. So that

increase so far is about 8 and a half to

9x since September. Worse than what

we're seeing with DDR5 by a lot

actually. DDR4 16 Gbit session average

experienced the greatest surge seemingly

disproportionately affected by EOL

announcements causing low supply because

manufacturing's going offline and

surging stockpiling demand soaring from

about $8 in August to $15 in

mid-occtober to then nearly $80 by mid

January where it's remained since. We

made this chart to identify the rate of

price increases which is comparable

among the entries because we're kind of

normalizing here. We've plotted the

price multiplier rather than the actual

dollar amount. Each entry's price

multiplier is relative to its own

previously stable price, not to the

others. This is held between July and

September of last year for the

previously stable prices. DDR5 16 Gbit

session average at slower speeds,

surpassed its previously stable price by

2x just before November, exceeded both

3x and then 4x in November, which is

also when we made our RAM at WTF video,

and shot five and 6x past its previously

stable price in January, gradually

increasing since, and currently it's

approaching a 7x multiplier. SSDs are

far worse. 512 Gbit TLC session average

prices broke 2x and then 3x past its

previously stable price by November,

plateaued in December, then jumped to

6.56x

multiplier by early February, pushing

the percent of its increases just past

DDR5s before widening the gap further in

early March when it spiked to 8.6x its

previously stable price. DDR4 16 Gbits

price multiplier initially mimics DDR5,

surpassing 2x in mid-occtober, 3x in

early November, and 4x in mid November

before diverting paths and rapidly

climbing to around 9x its previously

stable price currently. While DDR5 RAM

kits still hold greater percent

increases compared to completed SSDs in

terms of current market pricing for

finished products to end users, our

understanding is that the SSD market

prices will eventually exceed DDR5's

percent increases as the market reflects

these recent changes. Some of the reason

for this lag could be buffer supply and

people being slower to notice and

therefore slower to stockpile. In this

table, we've collected Newegg prices for

a couple of the most popular two TB M.2

two NVMe SSDs we could find compiled

using PC Part Picker price history

charts. This means that now we're

looking at completed product pricing,

which could use different supply than

the prior table and also has other

product cost factors. Since November,

Crucial's P310 rose from $145 to $300,

making it the lowest priced entry at the

time of writing on this table. Micron

recently exited the direct sale memory

business, as in RAM, for its crucial

line most famously. So, there are some

other company decisions potentially

contributing here. Western Digital's

SN850X

increased from $190 to $350 or by 84.2%,

representing the lowest percent increase

on this table. Kingston's NV3

experienced the greatest surge by both

absolute cost and percent increase,

swelling from $150 to $380, or by 153%.

Finally, Samsung's 990 Pro more than

doubled in price from $190 to $400,

making it the highest priced entry and

accompanied by 111% increase. Of course,

there are more expensive SSDs out there,

but we're trying to narrow the band of

comparison. Averaging these entries

produces a collective price increase

from $168.75

in November to $35,7.50 50 cents

currently, yielding an average 113.7%

increase in the past 4 months of these

devices. We were also curious about the

increases for SSDs using China's NAND

flash newcomer YMTC. We previously

covered YMTC in our rise of Chinese

memory full-length documentary, which

we'll link below if you're curious about

the tumultuous rise of these companies.

This is the same chart of two terabyte

drives, but with YMTC supply added. The

Fanchion S880 using YMTC NAND is

comparable to each entry by advertised

read or write speeds. We haven't tested

these devices to validate their claimed

speeds, but we did check the spec sheets

for each and match them for the

comparison. We've also added labels to

indicate which SSDs use a host memory

buffer versus those possessing a DRAM

cache. Hypothetically, SSDs with a DRAM

cache would have a higher cost impact

than those without it. Thanks to the

separate DRAM pricing surge, as seen

here, with an over 120% increase since

November, SSDs using YMTC NAND are

apparently unable to avoid the

outrageous surges. YMTC and/or FCHON are

capitalizing on this in much the same

way as the other competitors. That being

said, the Fans SSD held the lowest price

in November by absolute price of these

anyway and is tied for the lowest price

currently. The drive is between $80 and

$100 less than the two highest priced

entries on this table, so it still

appears to offer competitive pricing

despite its recent increases. YNTC also

recently released its first PCIe 5.0

compliant NVME drive built on its

in-house XTacking 4.0 architecture

signaling its ability to remain

developmentally competitive with other

manufacturers progression for the latest

PCIe generation. Xtackin requires two

wafers so is a wafer expensive approach

to manufacturing that yields greater

density. And again, check out our rise

of Chinese memory video for more

information on YMTC and its expansion.

But we ultimately remain optimistic

about what a growing manufacturer means

for the industry amongst the shortage.

So far, they're still adjusting with the

industry, just a little bit lower, but

it makes it more difficult, at least for

companies to collude, hopefully,

especially as more cultures are

introduced. Related to that, we have

another documentary we put out recently

called the DRAM cartel, where we cover

the pricing collusion of American and

Korean manufacturers of the past. In

January, Chosen Biz citing Omdia

reported that both Samsung and SKH

highinex lowered NAND wafer output from

2025 to 2026, adding through machine

translation, quote, Some also say the

move reflects awareness that supply of

commodity Chinese NAND is increasing.

Unlike Samsung Electronics and SKHEX,

China's YMDC has been raising its

profile in the NAND market since last

year and steadily increasing volume. To

counter lowpriced competition from

China, the companies appear intent on

reducing NAN supply to mobile and PCs to

defend profitability while increasing

server and enterprise volumes to manage

the production mix. End quote. Which may

explain some of the reason that YMTC is

also coming up if the others are

reducing supply because YMTC has supply.

Now, this table plots the same data but

focuses instead on the most commonly

used 2 and 1/2 in SATA SSDs. We could

find price histories for 2 and 1/2 in

SATA drives are becoming less common. So

there are additional contributing

factors like potentially some of the

manufacturing shifting to other

technologies. Since November, PNY CS900

increased from $153 to $220 or by nearly

44%. Team Group's TF Force Vulcan nearly

doubled from $118 to $230 or 95%

increase achieving the greatest percent

increase listed. Samsung's 870 EVO rose

from $190 to $360 or $170 in total,

granting it the greatest absolute

increase. Collectively, the average

prices of these listings inflated from

around $148 in November to $260

currently, yielding a combined average

76.3% increase within a 4-month span.

Hard drives don't use, they use platters

or spinning discs, aka spinning rust.

Still, hard drives have manufacturing

output limitations as well, especially

with the recent surge in SSDs and are in

high demand for data centers. While we

didn't find reliable price histories for

any individual hard drives, we've

decided to include PC Part Picker price

trends chart for 3 and 1/2 in STA 16 TB

hard drives. As seen here, prices

hovered around $350 for almost the

entire year. Around December or so,

prices gradually increased, a trend

that's continued monthly since. The

average 16 terbyte hard drive price has

climbed from $350 to $440 currently,

which amounts to over a 25% increase in

just a few months. This is modest

compared to the over 75% SATA SSD

average increase and nearly 115% NVME

SSD increases, but it's still a

noticeable price hike. We anticipate

these prices will continue to climb,

especially for 20 TBTE and other

segments desirable to data centers. As

for why the prices are increasing, we've

broken it down into a few key elements.

The first is a hard drive shortage

forming seemingly overnight towards the

end of 2025 and beginning of this year,

which in turn has accelerated the data

center transition towards SSDs during a

time of unforeseen storage demand, which

is causing pressure on the SSD market.

Also, this PC Mag write up from February

notes that AI data centers reserved all

of Western Digital's 2026 supply

already. quoting Western Digital CEO as

saying quote we are pretty much sold out

for calendar 2026 we have firm IPOs with

our top seven customers end quote PC Mag

noted 89% of WD's revenue comes from

enterprise and cloud service solutions

which would include data centers data

center Dynamics citing VP of storage

provider Everpure formerly Pure Storage

describes the sudden shift explaining

quote customers have been somewhat

blindsided by the shortage as recently

as two quarters ago there was still

plenty of supply, he says, describing

the current situation as scramble mode,

end quote. DCD's report also claims

enterprise hard drives are quote

currently facing lead times of up to two

years as manufacturers struggle to keep

up with demand end quote and explains

how quote one way data center operators

are looking to mitigate this problem is

by transitioning to flash storage,

specifically QLC or quadle cell storage.

End quote. In the finance world, City

estimates that quote approximately 1,152

terabytes of additional SSD NAND will be

required per Vera Rubin server system to

support Nvidia's ICMS end quote. Vera

Rubin is Nvidia's new server solution

and ICMS is the inference context memory

storage platform. So that's over one

pabyte of extra storage per Vera Rubin

solution. City continues quote

accordingly assuming Vera Rubin server

shipments of 30,000 units in 2026 and

100,000 units in 2027 NAN demand driven

by ICMS is projected to reach 34.6

million terabytes in 2026 and 115.2

million terabytes in 2027. This

represents 2.8% of expected global NAND

demand in 2026 and 9.3%

in 2027. a meaningful scale that is

likely to create significant upside

potential for demand. End quote. Now to

us, that climb from 2.8 to 9.3 is really

the concerning part on the consumer

side. Similarly, according to this is

actually their name, Mordor

Intelligence,

if it's a the Balro driving the

intelligence or what, but quote

Microsoft because of course it's

Microsoft following Mordor. Microsoft,

Azure, and AWS each bought more than

500,000 SSDs per quarter in 2025 to feed

AI inference clusters. End quote. The

IDC reports that the worldwide server

market quote grew by 97.3% in spending

in the second quarter of 2025. End

quote. Naturally, the NAND manufacturers

have begun shifting production capacity

away from consumer SSDs and instead

towards higher margin, high demand

enterprise SSDs, which Trend Force

supports, reporting, quote, "The primary

growth driver was explosive demand for

enterprise SSDs fueled by large-scale AI

server deployments by North American

CSBs." Meanwhile, severe hard drive

shortages and extended lead times

accelerated a shift towards NAND

solutions, which further tightened

supply. end quote. Trend Force also

wrote, quote, "Capacity allocation will

increasingly prioritize server

applications, further tightening supply

for consumer products." End quote. And

now at the height of demand for NAND

flash, the manufacturers have reportedly

begun cutting NAND production from its

output last year with Chosen Biz

reporting through machine translation.

Quote, according to data from market

researcher Omdia obtained by Chosen Biz

on the 20th, Samsung electronics

slightly lowered its NAND wafer output

from 4.9 million last year to 4.68

million this year. That is less than the

reduced production implemented last year

due to sharply deteriorating NAND

profitability in 2024. SKHEX's NAND

output is also expected to follow a

similar path from around 1.9 million

last year to 1.7 million this year. End

quote. So at peak demand and as demand

is actually growing annually, some of

these companies are cutting production

and as far as we can tell, they're doing

it to maintain higher prices. That sure

sounds familiar. Our conclusion today is

pretty simple. SSD prices are absurd and

we try not to predict things because

honestly we know really just about as

much as you do watching this where most

of our data today it comes from publicly

available sources. We look at bank

statements, what they're saying, what

analyst firms are saying. We look at

earnings reports. All of this anyone

could look at. It's nothing special.

It's not privileged information we have.

Uh so we try not to predict things. The

indication I'm getting though, if I had

to take a guess, is that based on what

we're seeing, it probably will get worse

before it gets better. The RAM

situation, that's what we said in

November, and look where it is now. We

went from two or 3x or something like

that to like five or 6x on the prices.

Uh, and it looks like SSDs are following

that trajectory. And actually in some

ways the trajectory is is worse, but

there's a latent sort of buffered impact

to consumer completed product pricing.

And so whenever that buffer either

subsides or demand changes in a way that

knocks it out of balance from where it

is now, it seems like there'll be a

sudden surge in consumer pricing, not

just in the spot prices and and we'd

assume contract prices. So that would be

our guess. To quickly recap, due to a

mixture of SSD and hard drive shortages,

unprecedented AI server and data center

storage demand as servers transition to

NVME drives, and manufacturers with a

long history of collusion choosing to

cut supply further amidst the shortage.

NAND flash wafer spot prices are

increasing at an even faster rate than

DDR5 with 512 GB TLC spot pricing for

supply currently sitting at 8.57X, its

previously stable price held between

July and September 2025. Furthermore,

major manufacturers are running out of

capacity for 2026, like Kioxia, which

already sold out of its SSDs, and

Western Digital, which has sold out of

its hard drives. Current DDR5 RAM kit

market prices still hold a greater

percent increase than completed SSD

market prices, but we expect SSD prices

to skyrocket in the somewhat near future

as the consumer market eventually shifts

to reflect the most recent spot market

changes. As an aside, we have some

firstirhand experience with this. So, we

bought over 10,000 USB flash drives at

128 GB each for our Kickstarter style

campaigns we did for our black market

movie and our AI dystopia series of

coverage where we're doing all kinds of

special reports on things in the

industry. And a lot of you supported us

for those efforts. We as part of the

backer tiers sent out these flash drives

with some of our videos loaded on them.

And uh the part that's interesting, so

we're buying those from MicroEnter.

We're not getting it straight from the

source because I trust Microenter

sourcing. I like where they get them

from, which I think is flies on and uh

and it works pretty well. But even they

right now, they can't really supply us

with more because the pricing is out of

whack and it's not predictable. And so

you start looking at a faster rate of

change in the market for buying supply

as someone who might be selling it and

that's going to cause ripples and

problems as well. I mean, for us, we

just simply aren't buying more of them.

We have a little bit of a stockpile if

we do, you know, more stuff with it. Um,

but a lot of these companies, they don't

have that option because their main

business might be selling storage

products and so they're going to just

buy more and then increase the price

accordingly. But there's a bit of a

buffer, a lag to that. In terms of

forecast, Trend Force's most recent NAND

flash report reads, quote, "Trendforce

notes that with limited near-term NAND

capacity, expansion, and surging AI

demand, pricing momentum is expected to

remain strong throughout 2026." End

quote. So, that's kind of your recap on

the flash pricing, the SSD pricing. We

have this in our RAM what the video

as well. It's the same kind of format.

We're trying to look at it before it

gets too crazy to have something

historically to look back at and

understand what happened. Uh but there

are a lot of parallels here to what we

saw happen with the DRAM cartel in the

past. And you know these companies a lot

of them are the same and they do adjust

their supply based on profitability. So

I mean it's one thing to be able to sell

everything you make. they can do that

even if they make more. But if you don't

have to work harder to make the same

money, then I guess if you have

cooperative competitors, you just don't.

So that's part of this too. Uh and

then there's just the data center

demand. But as far as you know, is there

anything you can do? The answer is no.

Obviously, there's nothing any of us can

do. Uh, I guess if you're going to build

a computer, it's the same thing we were

saying with the RAM situation where it's

like

it certainly seems unlikely that it

would get better anytime in the near

term. Maybe it will through later this

year, especially if the bubble starts

popping or something. I don't know. I

have no idea. Like, I'm throwing

a dart at a board just like anyone else

would. Uh, but that's what it seems

like. And we'll continue to monitor the

RAM and the SSD pricing situations as we

get through the year. We'll do regular

updates just like we do with our GPU

pricing segment. But right now, that's

the trend. If you were wondering what

the happened to the SSD prices,

then that's your answer. Uh, the same

thing that happened to the RAM prices.

So, that's it for this one. Thanks for

watching. Subscribe for more. If you

want to support this kind of work

directly and the research we do, you can

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