I have seen memes about gaming hardware getting more expensive but I ignore them because that kind of thing has always been beyond my reach. The difference between a $2k PC and a $3k PC is moot because I would never have either.
But recently I wanted to upgrade my storage from 500gb to 1 tb. The prices are insane!! In 2024 when I bought 500gb nvme it was CAD$50. A comparable SATA was close to the same price. Now the exact same item is $130.
1tb is now $200-600 on amazon. Am I searching wrong?!
5 years ago I bought a 8tb external HDD for $170 and now the same one is almost $700. It looks like you can get 8tb as “cheap” as $400 but I’m not sure if they are the same quality.
Is this because of donald trump and/or AI?
Is it going to get better at some point?
How can the world function like this? We are so reliant on storage for everything. Is this price increase reflected in bulk sales to industry?
I had been wanting for the last few years to build a proper home server, and to build a new gaming PC.
Gaming PC has been out of the question for a while now. Crypto led into AI, plus all thr nonsense the manufacturers have been pulling. I had a brief hope last year that the AMD 9070 or 9070XT might be reasonable, but alas the MSRP was completely fake.
Then the RAM prices increased from AI. I had an old machine cobbled together from 2013-2014 budget gaming PC’s, and it had 16GB of DDR3, so I turned that into my server. Slapped in a 1TB SATA SSD that I probably got around d 2022-ish and that would get me by until the market corrects and I can build a proper server, right?
Well then the drive prices started to climb. First the SSD’s because the NAND was being diverted to RAM, then the HDD’s because of the lack of SSD’s and the rise of data centers using them. The resty of my server may be old (so reliability is a concern) but its got plenty of performance for what I use it for. So this time I decided to try to buy on the upswing and get the HDD’s. I ended up spending a little over $1k for two WD 24TB NAS drives. One of them was DOA. After over a month of phone calls and emails with both B&H and WD, I eventually got a replacement from WD.
B&H at first offered to let me just send the drive back and replace it, but they were completely out of 24TB drives and wanted me to pay $200 to upgrade to the 26TB drive. Which was completely ridiculous because I was RAID’ing them, so either I pay a ton more for no extra effective storage or I pay like $400 more to do both drives and get 2TB of effective (albeit redundant) storage.
So instead I went through WD. Took a long time- they didn’t ship a drive for 2 weeks after they received my defective one. When I followed up, the impression I got fro the representative was that they were trying to find a drive to send me. Eventually one came in the mail: they just went ahead and sent me a 26TB drive at no cost. It seems even WD themselves was completely out and didn’t think they would be able to get another one anytime soon. On PCPartPicker now, the 24TB drive is listed at $670 a piece and completely out of stock everywhere
That’s absolutely wild to me. Part of the reason I went with 24TB drives I the first place was that the smaller ones in the 16-20 TB range were sold out.
I used to think I could just wait it out. I built PC’s for my wife and I in 2019 and early 2020, each with an RX580. Covid hit and I thought “wow I’m glad I bought those when I did”. Then the Crypto boom hit and I thought “wow once this bubble bursts I should try to upgrade”. Then AI happened. At this point I don’t have any hope anymore. I truly believe these manufacturers have former a cartel and have effectively bribed enough government officials of thr most powerful and relevant global economies. The goal is to end personal computing and instead move to lightweight clients with cloud subscriptions. In 45 years, I’m going to be the weird old dude trying desperately to maintain his 50 year old hardware, scavenging estate sales for parts.