We spent most of this year talking about RAM prices, and while everyone was watching the memory line on the quote, storage went and did the exact same thing. SSDs used to be the boring, cheap part of a build, the one you barely thought about. Now a drive can cost more than the processor. If you've gone to buy a drive lately and assumed the listing was a mistake, it wasn't.
How bad it actually is
Tom's Hardware tracked the same drives across twelve months, and the numbers are grim. A Samsung 990 EVO Plus 2TB that was $113 on offer last summer is now $363. That's a 221% increase in a year. Dropping down to a slower SATA drive doesn't save you either: a 2TB Samsung 870 EVO that was around $150 is now roughly $399. Those are US tracked prices, but Irish and EU retailers are riding exactly the same wave.
Why it won't fix itself in a few months
It's a supply problem. Retailers aren't chancing their arm. NAND flash production is being pointed at enterprise drives for AI datacentres, because that's where the money is. Phison's chief executive said this month that he's been told it will take roughly four years for new production capacity to catch up with demand. New fabs don't go up as fast as a datacentre does. Micron has also announced it's winding down Crucial, its consumer brand, to focus on enterprise. Fewer players making consumer drives is never good for what you pay.
What to actually buy
Roughly where the tiers sit at the moment, and who each one suits. The headline speeds matter far less for gaming than the marketing suggests.
| Gen 5 M.2 | Fastest on paper, priciest, runs hot. Almost no gaming benefit over Gen 4 |
| Gen 4 M.2 | The sweet spot. Fast enough for anything you'll play, best value per GB |
| Gen 3 M.2 / SATA SSD | Fine as a second library drive if the price gap is real. Often it isn't |
| Mechanical hard drive | Back on the table purely for bulk storage: recordings, mods, older games |
For a gaming build I'd take a 1TB Gen 4 drive today and add a second one later, over stretching to a 2TB now. M.2 slots are the easiest upgrade in a PC (pop the cover, one screw, done), and prices per gigabyte improve as drives get bigger, so a future 2TB purchase should sting less than doubling up today does.
Where people are getting caught
The mistakes I'm seeing
- Buying a prebuilt without checking the drive size or generation
- Paying Gen 5 money for load times you won't notice
- Sacrificing RAM to afford a bigger drive
- Assuming prices will drop back if you wait a couple of months
What works better
- Read the full spec sheet. Storage is the easiest spec to bury
- A good Gen 4 drive, sized to what you actually play
- Get the RAM right first, add storage afterwards
- Buy when you need it, at a tier that makes sense
That first one matters most. It's very hard to disguise a prebuilt shipping with 16GB of RAM instead of 32GB, but it's easy to bury a small or slow drive halfway down a spec sheet. When part costs jump, storage is where corners get cut.
Making your current drive last
If you're not buying anything yet, you can claw back a surprising amount of space in an evening:
- Uninstall the two or three big games you haven't opened in six months. Modern titles are often 100GB and up
- Clear shader caches and old game recordings, which can build up to tens of gigabytes
- Move your library folder rather than reinstalling. Steam and the Xbox app both support moving installs between drives
- Leave roughly 10–15% of an SSD free; they slow down noticeably when packed to the brim
- Check for a spare M.2 slot before assuming you need to replace what you have
What I'd spec today
Storage now shapes a build the way memory does, and nothing in the supply picture suggests fast relief. I wouldn't put off a gaming PC over it. Get the RAM right first, fit a solid 1TB Gen 4 drive, and check there's a free M.2 slot for when you need more room.
