- SSDs have skyrocketed in price over the last month and a half
- Tom’s Hardware compared the cost of some high-end SSDs to gold in terms of their relative weight
- It turns out that high-end 8TB SSDs are, on average, worth more than gold now by weight, and some 4TB models are 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 price inflation fueled by the memory crisis), the answer is, incredibly, yes, for high-end, high-capacity drives anyway.
Tom’s Hardware reports that a discussion arose on Reddit about this topic, and our sister site did some comparisons of the relative cost-to-weight ratios of 24k gold versus certain NVMe SSD models.
Those are the compact device-type SSDs, of course, which connect to the 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 offline by a major manufacturer, Samsung, as you may have seen recently.)
To solve this, Tom’s compiled 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 business units (loaded with a ton of extra amenities), which were not considered because they would throw out the overall value equation.
And obviously no SSD with a heatsink was included, as that adds a lot to the weight (which averaged around 8 grams for the 4TB models, and just a little more at 8.2 grams for the 8TB drives).
With the 8TB models, Tom’s estimated 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 the comparison was compiled.
Therefore, these high-end SSDs are worth more than their weight in gold, literally.
As for 4TB SSDs, they are not there yet with their average price, but some of the best models exceed the price of the equivalent weight in gold.
Analysis: storage pain
Unfortunately, storage follows in the footsteps of RAM. While the price of SSDs hasn’t skyrocketed as much as system memory, things have already gotten pretty bad.
Tom’s shows us a price chart for PartPicker PC 4TB NVMe drives, and you can clearly see that prices rose sharply in December, and there was an even bigger spike in the first half of January. Hence this surprising comparison with the price of gold, and it is even worse with faster 8TB models.
Where do we go from here? I don’t think the suggestion that the only way is up is too controversial. It’s just a matter of what the flight path will be from here and how steep the climb will be.
So if you need an SSD for an upgrade or new PC build, you may want to make a purchase sooner rather than later (regardless of size, but certainly with the higher-end models). For example, you can still get a Samsung 9100 Pro for $600 on Newegg in the US, and while the same drive was on sale for $400 during Black Friday just a couple of months ago, its price will most likely increase at a rate of knots from now on.
If we look at our favorite SSD, the WD Black SN8100, the 2TB model was $220 during Black Friday, but now, wait for it, $499 at Newegg. Oh. Western Digital models appear to be at the top of price increases, Tom’s notes, although that could be partly related to the popularity of the units and how quickly stock is selling out as a result.
The situation on the storage grounds is unpleasant at the moment, but it could well get worse, and most likely will get worse. In the meantime, we may see some creative solutions floating around, and as we made clear earlier this week, those looking for an SSD for their PS5 could be looking for an alternative way to fix their storage problem.
The best SSDs for all budgets
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