- SSD prices have skyrocketed in the last month and a half
- Tom’s Hardware compared the cost of some high-end SSDs to gold in terms of relative weight
- It turns out that high-end 8TB SSDs are now worth more than gold by weight on average – and a few 4TB models are worth that too.
If you’ve ever wondered whether SSDs are more valuable than gold, gram for gram, in terms of weight – and some people have, following the price inflation brought on by the memory crisis – the answer is, incredibly enough, yes, for high-end high-capacity drives, anyway.
Tom’s Hardware reports that a discussion on Reddit has taken place around this topic, and our sister site has made comparisons of the relative cost-to-weight ratios of 24k gold versus some NVMe SSD models.
These are of course compact stick-style SSDs that plug into your motherboard via an M.2 slot. (It’s worth noting that SATA SSDs, which are much slower than NVMe drives, are at risk of being pulled down by a major manufacturer, Samsung, as you may have seen recently.)
To solve this problem, Tom’s put together a list of SSDs (over 100) from major US retailers (Newegg, Microcenter, Best Buy, and Walmart), all of which were PCIe 4 or 5 models with at least 4TB capacity (and currently in stock). These were all consumer models, with expensive enterprise initiatives (laden with lots of extra features), which weren’t considered because they would throw out the overall value equation.
And obviously, no SSD with a heatsink was included because that significantly increases the weight (which averaged around 8 grams for the 4TB models, and just over at 8.2 grams for the 8TB drives).
With the 8TB models, Tom’s determined that the average price is now $1,476 with their sample. And the price of 8.2 grams of gold? That’s about $1,200, based on a price of $148 per gram at the time of comparison.
So, these high-end SSDs are literally worth their weight in gold.
As for 4TB SSDs, they’re not there yet with their average price, but a few of the higher-end models exceed the gold equivalent weight price.
Analysis: storage issues
Storage unfortunately follows in the footsteps of RAM. Even though the price of SSDs hasn’t increased as much as that of system memory, the situation has already gotten pretty bad.
Tom’s shows us a price chart for 4TB NVMe drives from PC PartPicker, and you can clearly see that prices increased significantly in December, and there was an even bigger rise in the first half of January. Hence this eyebrow-raising comparison with the price of gold, and it’s even worse with the faster 8TB models.
Where do we go from here? I don’t think it’s too controversial a suggestion that the only way is up. It’s just a question of what the flight path might be from here and how steep the climb is.
So if you need an SSD for an upgrade or new PC build, you may want to pull the trigger on a purchase sooner rather than later (regardless of size, but certainly with higher-end models). For example, you can still get a Samsung 9100 Pro for $600 at Newegg in the US, and even though the same drive was on sale for $400 for Black Friday a few months ago, there’s a good chance its price will go up by several nodes from now on.
Looking at our favorite SSD, the WD Black SN8100, the 2TB model was $220 on Black Friday, but it’s now – wait for it – $499 on Newegg. Ouch. Western Digital models appear to be at the forefront of price increases, Tom’s observes, although this may partly have to do with reader popularity and how quickly stocks sell off as a result.
The situation is currently dire in the storage areas, but the situation could well get worse – and is very likely to get worse. In the meantime, we might see some creative solutions floating around, and as we made clear earlier this week, those in the market for an SSD for their PS5 might be looking for another way to solve their storage problem.
The best SSDs for every budget
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