The graphics card shortage got the headlines. The RAM crisis got the memes. Now it is storage’s turn. NAND flash prices have roughly doubled since late 2025, and the fallout is landing on the same people who already absorbed higher GPU and DRAM bills this year: PC gamers building new rigs, console owners eyeing expansion cards, and handheld players who need every gigabyte they can get.
A 2TB NVMe drive that cost $120 to $150 a year ago now runs $300 to $480 depending on the model. A 1Tb TLC NAND chip that sold for about $4.80 in July 2025 is going for roughly $10.70 today. Storagediskprices’ February 2026 survey put a Samsung 990 Pro 1TB at $218, up from just $50 in June 2023, with a typical quality 1TB NVMe now running $100 to $150 and premium drives reaching $140 to $180. Microsoft says console storage and memory costs are up more than 2.5x, with another doubling expected by fall 2027. None of this is a rumor cycle. It is a documented supply squeeze, and the data behind it explains why SSD prices in 2026 are not behaving anything like a normal market.
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What’s Actually Happening to SSD Prices Right Now
Retail tracking from Newegg’s Insider desk shows NAND flash remains in significant undersupply, with meaningful relief unlikely before 2027. As of August 2026, the broader shortage is still expected to run through the rest of the year and possibly into 2027. Data cited from Gamers Nexus puts average NVMe SSD pricing up around 115% compared with recent baselines. Those are averages, and averages hide the worst cases. A hardware outlet reported on July 27, 2026 that a drive which listed at $79.99 was selling for $400, a five-fold jump on a single SKU that shows just how uneven the pain has become across brands and capacities.
Not every data point points straight up. Some listings have eased slightly in July: a Kingston NV3 1TB drive that hovered near $164 for months dipped to $159.99, and a WD Blue SN5000 1TB that peaked near $249 at Walmart came down about $45. TrendForce’s own July 2026 street-price tracking shows the same pattern at the margins, with a 1TB Samsung 990 Pro easing to $238.88 (down 0.12%) and a 2TB PNY CS2150 slipping to $395.00 (down 1.00%). Those small pullbacks are the exception, not a trend reversal, and they sit inside a market that is still dramatically more expensive than it was in 2025.
The Numbers Behind the NAND Flash Shortage
NAND flash contract prices have climbed sharply through 2026, with quarter-over-quarter increases continuing into the second half of the year. Kingston told Forbes that the NAND flash prices it pays had already risen 246% during 2025 alone, and Dropreference tracked flash climbing another 85% to 90% in the first quarter of 2026, with TrendForce projecting a further 70% to 75% jump in the second quarter. Separate TrendForce-related coverage pegged Q1 2026 SSD contract prices as rising more than 40% amid the AI-driven shortage. The clearest single data point comes straight from the chip itself: Phison CEO Khein-Seng Pua said TLC 1-terabit NAND rose from $4.80 in July 2025 to $10.70 in 2026, more than doubling in well under a year. Phison, whose controllers ship inside a large share of the world’s consumer SSDs, has indicated that 2026 NAND production capacity is essentially sold out industry-wide, meaning the shortage is not a temporary retail hiccup but a booked-out supply chain.
That matters because SSD pricing is not really about the plastic, the PCB, or the controller. NAND die cost is the dominant line item in a drive’s bill of materials, so when the wafer-level price of flash memory doubles, the retail sticker eventually follows, with board partners and retailers passing the increase downstream as older, cheaper inventory sells through.
Why AI Data Centers Are Eating the World’s NAND Supply
The short version: enterprise SSDs pay better than consumer ones, and AI data centers are buying enterprise SSDs by the rack. DriveVault has tracked a 30TB TLC enterprise SSD go from $3,062 in the second quarter of 2025 to roughly $11,000 by early 2026, a nearly fourfold jump that shows exactly where fab capacity is being routed. Analysis from TrendForce attributes the surge directly to “explosive demand for enterprise SSDs, fueled by large-scale AI server deployments by North American cloud service providers.” Every wafer a fab allocates to a hyperscaler’s high-margin enterprise order is a wafer that does not become a $90 gaming SSD.
This is the same underlying dynamic driving up DDR5 RAM prices, which Tech Insider covered in detail earlier this year, and the same one squeezing handheld gaming hardware. NAND and DRAM are different chips with different fabs and different customers, but they are both memory, both suddenly precious to AI infrastructure buyers, and both getting reallocated away from consumer electronics at the same time.
Who Controls NAND Production Now
Five companies make almost all of the world’s NAND flash, and their Q4 2025 results show exactly how much AI demand has already reshaped the business.
| NAND Supplier | Q4 2025 Revenue | QoQ Growth | Market Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Samsung | $6.6 billion | +10.0% | 28.0% |
| SK Group (SK hynix + Solidigm) | $5.21 billion | +47.8% | 22.1% |
| Kioxia | $3.31 billion | +16.5% | Record bit shipments |
| Micron | ≈$3.03 billion | +24.8% | Not disclosed |
| SanDisk | ≈$3.03 billion | +31.1% | Not disclosed |
| Top 5 combined | $21.17 billion | +23.8% | N/A |
SK Group’s 47.8% quarter-over-quarter jump is the standout number in that table. It is also the company that owns Solidigm, an enterprise SSD specialist built from Intel’s old memory business, exactly the product line AI data centers are buying up. Samsung remains the largest supplier overall, but its more modest 10% growth suggests it is spreading capacity across both consumer and enterprise lines rather than chasing AI orders exclusively.
SSD Price Comparison: What Gamers Are Paying in July 2026
Newegg’s Insider desk published a snapshot of 2TB NVMe pricing on July 8, 2026, giving one of the cleanest same-day comparisons available across brands.
| Drive (2TB) | Interface | Sequential Read | Price (July 2026) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Samsung 9100 PRO | PCIe Gen5 | Up to 14,700 MB/s | $394.95 |
| Crucial P510 | PCIe Gen4/5 | N/A | $329.00 |
| WD_BLACK SN850X | PCIe Gen4 | Up to 7,300 MB/s | $328.38 |
| Team Group NV5000 | PCIe Gen4 | N/A | $289.99 |
| Crucial P310 | PCIe Gen4 | 7,100 MB/s | $288.90 |
Compare that against the $120 to $150 that a solid 2TB Gen4 drive cost roughly a year earlier and the shift is obvious: even the cheapest drive on this list costs about double what a mid-range 2TB SSD went for before the shortage. RamPriceHistory’s Q1 2026 U.S. tracker shows the same climb at smaller capacities, with 1TB NVMe drives running $75 to $100, up from $65 to $85 in Q1 2025, and 2TB drives at $130 to $170, up from $110 to $140 a year earlier. Samsung’s own lineup tells the same story internally. Its 990 Pro 2TB bottomed near $189 in 2025, while its Gen5 successor, the 9100 Pro, was listed around $478 in April 2026. Pricing has held at these elevated levels into August 2026, with no broad-based pullback yet visible across major retailers.
What This Means for PC Gamers Building or Upgrading
Storage used to be the easy line item in a gaming PC budget, the part upgraded later without much thought. That is no longer true. A 1TB consumer SSD that cost about $45 in late 2025 is close to $90 now, and that increase compounds with the GPU premiums and DDR5 markups already hitting builders this year. For someone assembling a new rig from scratch, the storage line can now add $150 to $300 more than it would have a year ago, depending on capacity and interface.
The practical shift is toward buying less capacity than gamers might have chosen in 2025, and toward PCIe Gen4 drives over Gen5, since the performance gap rarely matters for game load times but the price gap is significant.
Console Storage Costs Are Climbing Too
PS5 and Xbox Series X|S
Console makers are not exempt from wafer-level NAND and DRAM pricing, and both Sony and Microsoft have said so directly. Analyst firm Omdia estimated that combined memory already accounted for at least 20% of a base PS5’s total bill of materials back in Q2 2025, before this year’s price spike even started. Microsoft has been more explicit: the company has stated that console storage and memory costs are up more than 2.5x, with another doubling expected by fall 2027. That statement came alongside Xbox’s third price increase in just over a year, effective August 1, 2026, which added $100 to 512GB models and $150 to 1TB models. Microsoft is discontinuing the 2TB Xbox Series X entirely rather than absorb the storage cost.
Nintendo Switch 2 and the Handheld Squeeze
Nintendo is raising the Switch 2 price from $449.99 to $499.99, effective September 1, 2026, which will make it the fourth major gaming platform to hike prices in 2026 after Sony, Valve, and Microsoft. The same memory pressure is squeezing handheld PC makers, several of which have already halted shipments or raised prices rather than eat rising DRAM and NAND costs on thin hardware margins.
| Platform | 2026 Price Move | Storage/Memory Context |
|---|---|---|
| Nintendo Switch 2 | $449.99 → $499.99 (Sept 1) | Fourth platform to hike prices in 2026 |
| Microsoft Xbox Series X|S | +$100 (512GB) / +$150 (1TB), Aug 1 | Third hike in just over a year; 2TB SKU discontinued |
| Sony PlayStation 5 | Multiple 2026 price increases | Memory ≥20% of BOM per Omdia (Q2 2025) |
| Valve Steam Deck | Price increase on OLED models | Cited alongside broader 2026 memory pressure |
Market Impact: OEMs, Retailers, and Board Partners
The squeeze is rippling well past standalone SSD listings. Prebuilt gaming PC makers are quietly trimming default storage configurations or shifting entry-level models to smaller drives to hold sticker prices steady, since a $200 jump in the storage line is much harder to hide in a finished system than in an à la carte SSD purchase. One brand has reportedly wound down part of its consumer SSD lineup rather than compete on razor-thin margins against inflated NAND costs, according to trade coverage of the 2026 pricing environment. Retailers, meanwhile, are dealing with volatile day-to-day pricing that makes it hard to run the kind of predictable sales events gamers are used to. Outlets tracking the market, including iTechPost’s coverage of July’s NVMe discount events, note that promotional pricing now needs to be checked against a moving baseline rather than a fixed one.
Equity analysts are treating this as more than a hardware story. Jefferies Equity Research has modeled continued storage cost increases through the back half of 2026, which is as much a signal to console and PC OEMs’ investors as it is to shoppers. When a bank publishes a component-cost forecast, it usually means the follow-on effects, thinner hardware margins, delayed refreshes, or further price hikes, are already being priced into how the market values these companies.
How This Compares to the 2021-2022 Chip Shortage
The 2021-2022 shortage was broad and diffuse, a pandemic-driven crunch that touched everything from car computers to game consoles to graphics cards, caused mostly by a mismatch between foundry capacity and sudden demand spikes. This cycle looks different. It is concentrated specifically in memory, DRAM and NAND, and it is driven by a single, identifiable, ongoing cause: AI data center buildouts that are not slowing down. Where the 2021 shortage eased once foundries caught up and demand normalized, this one persists because the competing buyer, AI infrastructure, has a demand curve that keeps climbing rather than settling. That is part of why analysts are talking about relief timelines stretching into 2027, not months.
There’s also a structural difference in who has pricing power. During the 2021-2022 shortage, consumer electronics brands were still among the largest buyers courting foundries, which gave them some leverage to negotiate allocation. In 2026, gaming hardware makers are competing directly against Google, Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI for the same wafers, and those companies can absorb far higher per-unit memory costs than a console maker selling a $500 box on thin margins. That imbalance is a big part of why this shortage keeps producing retail price hikes instead of quietly resolving itself the way the last one eventually did.
The DRAM Parallel, and Why This Is a Different Squeeze
It’s worth being precise about what is and is not NAND. DRAM, the system memory in every PC and console, has had its own brutal 2026. A 32GB DDR5 module went from around $94 in late 2025 to $127 within three months, then to roughly $282 during the first quarter of 2026. That is a DRAM story, tracked separately in Tech Insider’s DDR5 pricing coverage. NAND flash for storage is a different chip, a different fab process, and a different set of dominant suppliers, even though both are getting swallowed by the same AI-driven memory crunch. Gamers are effectively paying twice: once on the RAM stick, once on the SSD.
How to Check Your Current SSD Before You Buy Another
Before spending $300-plus on a replacement or upgrade drive, it’s worth confirming exactly what you already have and whether it actually needs replacing. Both major desktop platforms make this a one-line check.
# Windows (PowerShell, run as Administrator)
Get-PhysicalDisk | Select-Object FriendlyName, MediaType, Size, HealthStatus
# Linux
lsblk -d -o NAME,MODEL,SIZE,ROTA
sudo nvme listIf your current drive shows a healthy status and reasonable free space, in this market it is worth holding off rather than buying into inflated Gen5 pricing for a marginal, game-load-time improvement.
Best Value SSDs to Buy Right Now Despite the Surge
Every price in this market is elevated, but not every drive is elevated equally. PCIe Gen4 drives such as the Samsung 990 EVO Plus and the SanDisk WD Black SN7100 remain the more defensible buys for most gaming builds, since Gen5 drives like the Samsung 9100 Pro command a steep premium for bandwidth that rarely translates into faster game loading. For a gaming-focused build, a 2TB Gen4 drive from the comparison table above, the WD_BLACK SN850X or Team Group NV5000, currently offers the best balance of capacity, heat output, and price per gigabyte. Tom’s Hardware runs a live SSD price tracker that is worth checking before any purchase, since per-model pricing shifts by the week in this market.
- Prioritize capacity over interface generation. Gen4 is fast enough for virtually every current game.
- Buy only what you need for the next 12-18 months rather than over-provisioning at inflated prices.
- Watch for the small pullbacks, like the Kingston and WD Blue dips seen in July, rather than buying at the first price you see.
When Will SSD Prices Drop? Predictions Through 2027
Forecasts vary, but none of them point to a quick fix. Here’s where the data points.
- No relief before late 2026 at the earliest. Multiple trackers agree that current pricing pressure extends at least through the back half of 2026.
- Continued increases are already forecast through Q4 2026. Jefferies Equity Research projects storage price increases of 40% to 50% in Q3 2026 and 30% to 40% in Q4 2026 before any deceleration.
- New fab capacity likely won’t land until late 2027. NAND manufacturers are investing now, but wafer fabs take years to come online, so the supply side cannot respond quickly.
- Prices will not return to early-2025 levels. Lenovo has publicly warned that DRAM and NAND pricing represents a permanent repricing rather than a temporary spike.
- Expect more console and handheld price hikes if NAND costs keep climbing through 2027, following the pattern already set by Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Valve this year.
What Gamers and PC Builders Should Do Now
The single most useful move is timing discipline: buy storage only when you need it, not speculatively, since prices are still moving and today’s number is not guaranteed to be tomorrow’s floor. For console owners, official expansion storage will track the same NAND pricing as retail SSDs, so there is little advantage in waiting for a first-party card to get cheaper than third-party alternatives. For PC builders, sticking with proven PCIe Gen4 drives, buying only the capacity you will actually use, and watching for the kind of small dips seen at Kingston and Western Digital in July are the most realistic ways to soften the impact of a shortage that, by every account gathered here, is not close to over.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are SSD prices going up in 2026?
NAND flash memory, the chip inside every SSD, is in short supply because AI data centers are buying enterprise SSDs at scale. TrendForce attributes the surge directly to AI server deployments by North American cloud providers, which leaves less fab capacity for consumer drives.
How much have SSD prices increased in 2026?
Roughly double on average since late 2025, with 1TB consumer drives moving from about $45 to nearly $90, and some individual SKUs rising far more. A 1Tb NAND chip itself went from about $4.80 to $10.70 over the same period.
When will SSD prices go back down?
Not soon. Forecasts range from late 2026 at the earliest to well into 2027, with Jefferies Equity Research projecting continued increases through Q4 2026 and new NAND fab capacity not expected until late 2027.
Are console storage expansion cards affected by the SSD price surge?
Yes. Console makers source the same NAND flash as PC SSD vendors, so official and third-party expansion storage for PS5, Xbox, and Switch 2 is subject to the same cost pressure driving retail SSD prices higher.
Should I buy an SSD now or wait?
If you need storage now, buy only the capacity you need rather than over-provisioning. If you can wait, watch for the small pullbacks some retailers have shown in July 2026, since prices are volatile week to week even within an overall upward trend.
Is this the same crisis as the DDR5 RAM shortage?
It’s related but not identical. DRAM (system memory) and NAND (storage) are different chips from different production lines, but both are being squeezed by the same AI data center demand, so PC builders are effectively facing two separate price spikes at once.
Which SSDs still offer good value during the shortage?
PCIe Gen4 drives generally offer better value than Gen5 right now, since the performance difference rarely affects game load times. Drives like the WD_BLACK SN850X, Team Group NV5000, and Samsung 990 EVO Plus currently sit toward the lower end of the inflated pricing curve.
Related Coverage
- DDR5 RAM Prices Up 110% as AI Devours Memory [2026]
- RAM Shortage 2026: AI Chips Hit 5 Gaming Platforms’ Prices
- Gaming GPU Prices Surge: RTX 5090 Tops $5,000 [2026]
- Xbox Price Increase: Series X Hits $799.99 Aug 1 [2026]
- Nintendo Switch 2 Jumps to $499.99 Sept 1 [2026]
- Best SSD for PS5 vs Xbox vs Switch 2: 8TB vs 2TB [2026]
- How to Install an NVMe SSD: 13 Steps, 50 Min [2026]
