Back in the heady days of late 2021, your average 1TB SATA SSD would cost you somewhere north of $400. Sure, you could grab a 6GB/s HDD with 1TB of space for around $50, but in the world of computing, you get what you pay for. Then came 2022 and suddenly SSD prices are dropping.
By how much are prices dropping, you ask? Well, you can grab a decent 2TB SSD for around $100 right now. The Teamgroup AX2 is a SATA-III SSD and is only $99 right now. Likewise with Level SSDs. Even Samsung’s excellent 870 EVO 1TB SSD is under $100. These are prices we have never seen for solid-state drives.
The cause of these price drops is a sluggish economy in the hard drive space. As TechRadar Pro reported last week, sales for SSDs and HDDs are down across the board. Also, the COVID-19 pandemic and all the ensuing supply chain issues since 2020 have obliterated manufacturers’ bottom lines. All of this is adding downward pressure on SSD prices.
“Due to slow destocking among distributors and a conservative stocking approach among clients, inventory problems have bubbled over upstream onto the supply side and sellers are under increased pressure to sell.” TrendForce, a market agency that uses AI to monitor markets around the world, said in a report back in July. “The decline in NAND Flash wafer pricing is estimated to expand to 15~20%.”
The message you should take from all of this is simple: buy your SSDs between now and Black Friday. The biggest sales event of the year is bound to keep the price pressure on SSDs, but that may not last. The past two months have seen a flurry of announcements from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia and all their new hardware will start hitting the market soon. You can expect to see prices start to climb back up after the holiday season as demand for new powerful computers rises.
2TB seems to be the perfect spot for SSD pricing right now, coming in at less than $200. This is the exact same price as high-end HDD storage. The key is timing, and now is the time to get it.
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