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will I ever be able to afford a disk drive ever again? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 14 hours ago by imaradio@lemmy.ca to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.ca

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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?

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[–] tal@lemmy.today 6 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

If you can live with rotational storage for whatever you're doing, those prices haven't moved as much as SSDs, though they are going up now too (probably people who would have bought solid state storage switching to rotational drives).

Memory prices are expected to start coming down in 2028, when more production capacity starts coming online, and it sounds like to some extent, manufacturers can shift capacity between DRAM (like, DIMMs/HBM) and NAND (flash), so I'd imagine that you won't see any substantial improvement in SSD prices prior to 2028, since they'll be trying to sell as much DRAM to AI companies as possible given available capacity.

EDIT:

Is this because of donald trump and/or AI?

AI. Trump's tariffs generally negatively impact prices Americans pay, since they create a barrier to importing goods to the US. Assuming, from your home instance and the prices that you're listing, that you're in Canada, if anything, Trump imposing tariffs will tend to decrease costs on things for Canadians, since they'll tend to cause Americans to purchase less of that thing, reducing demand for it on the international market. Less demand, all else held equal, reduces market prices.

(There are some exceptions, like where an input is imported to the US and then used to manufacture something and exported to Canada, but searching, it looks like the US doesn't presently manufacture NAND memory.)