analysts warn costs won't normalize until 2028, so buy RAM and SSDs now.
I’ll buy RAM and SSD’s then, thanks.
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2026
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spoiler
It won't ever go back down
The fucking gall, right?
Yeah that's happened before, with both memory and hard drives. A flood in Thailand caused HDD shortages and price spikes for a year or two around 2012, and there was a similar situation with DRAM some years earlier. There have also been GPU and SSD shortages due to cryptocurrency idiots. This may just be more of the same.
The GPU shortage may have ended but the crazy prices never really went away
Because as the crypto demand ended, the AI demand for high end gpus rose
There was some time in between actually
And prices settled a bit during those few months.
In capitalism, if the demand is outstripping supply then eventually higher prices will command greater investment and the eventual return to normalcy of the supply vs demand curve. In theory it is more of the same, but how prolonged it will be will be dependent on when the AI supply/demand curve achieves normalcy.
Some of the shortages have been due to supply interruptions, like the hard drive factory getting flooded, or similarly with a DRAM factory catching on fire. I don't know what happened after the Chia lunacy (Chia was a crypto currency that consumed vast amounts of SSD space and destroyed the SSD's through extreme write wear) but prices did normalize after a while. I know that Chia was the final straw that got Hetzner to ban crypto mining on its hardware outright. Previously, it was forbidden on VPS's but allowed on dedicated servers. Anyway it caused a temporary shortage of both SSD and hard drives.
Unfortunately besides chips, another huge input to this AI crap is electric power, which is coming mostly from expanding fossil fuel consumption and thus increasing planetary heating. Economists' intersecting curves are of no help with that.
This time is different because the chip fabs intentionally retooled for AI chips. It's not an uncontrollable external pressure.
There's no guarantee that they'll switch back to consumer modules after the bubble pops. I'm willing to bet that Big Tech's contingency plan to the pop is to utilize a dead consumer market to push subscription based virtual desktops and zero clients.
At least one major manufacturer also outright pulled out of the consumer market entirely. There's no guarantee that they'll come back, or else they would have just kept the consumer arm.
Really wish I had bought some more hdds, NVMe, and ram last November. But I just haaaaad to wait for January
Same. I soon need a new HDD for my growing collection of Linux ISOs. Bought one 24tb drive for about 350 last May and the very same drive now costs 500+
Sure wish I had bought a second one back then
Y do u collect Linux ISOs?
Because I like to stare at them in my free time. Sometimes for like 2-2.5h, sometimes only 1 hour or even 20 minutes.
Do you ever stare at them for 26.372 minutes?
That's the sweet spot
lol, that was about the size drive I was targeting. I got one for Xmas at least, but then the price just kept going up and up and up. I wanted to get 4 or 5 more to set up a raid array
I'm just glad the SMART values of mine all look good. I might have to slow down my acquisition of Linux ISOs for a little, but I hope it gets better soon
I am sooo glad I got my new gaming rig last black friday, even though it wasn't a great discount
I can't even buy the ram I need anymore, even if I wanted to pay out the ass for it.
I bought a framework laptop without RAM just before all this, decided to splurge on 2x24GB sticks. I'm glad I did but I still wish I bought bigger ones.
Same. My sister bought a kit of two 16gb sodimm sticks back in October for ~$100. I regret trying to wait for holiday deals...
Call: if openai tanks it's IPO, a lot of ram and SSD manufacturers will tank too
Hence why openAI seems now to want to stall IPO as long as they can...
And you are right, they singlehandedly are most of the problem despite not even being in the strongest position even if you are bullish on AI.
That's the whole idea. Buy up all the silicon production, go public, tank and take the rest of the tech industry down with you, and rule the world.
I bought a a 2Tb NVme last April and it has has since doubled in price. Crazy times man. Guess I'm sitting on my rig for the foreseeable.
Same, bought 2x22TB enterprise HDDs for $260 each in May of last year. Even recertified ones now go for $650. Praying they don't die
I hate this stupid gold rush at the expense of the consumer.
Who else would it be at the expense of?
The wealthy haven’t finished funneling everything to themselves.
Selling to consumers is charity at this point. They are such a tiny portion of the market. Consumer will lose always unless regulations step in.
Witg finite supply casual users will lose against people using computers to make money.
so buy RAM and SSDs now.
Ah, so, marketing, not news...
I mean, both times in two years ive bought storage/ram the prices have increased afterwards. So depends on how much you need it/can wait.
Two decades of being twatted on the nose for price fixing disappears in one year.
Brings me back to the 90's, remember the RAM dealers at the computer swap meets/parts conventions?