If you've been planning to upgrade your computer with a new, affordable, high-capacity SSD, we've got some bad news - the window of opportunity has just closed. The golden era of getting a terabyte of flash storage for a modest $45 is over, and the forecasts for 2026 and 2027 look downright scary.
“Be honest with yourself - the days of cheap SSDs are over,“ said Shunsuke Nakato, a senior manager at Japanese giant Kioxia. During a meeting in Seoul, he revealed a shocking fact: the company's entire 2026 NAND chip production has already been sold out. When supply is exhausted before devices have even rolled off the assembly line, the economic logic is only one - prices will skyrocket.
The main culprit for this “hardware apocalypse“ is none other than the hunger of artificial intelligence. The giants in the field of AI are buying up every available piece of memory for their huge data centers, leaving crumbs for the average user. The situation is further complicated by the strategic reshuffle of the leaders Samsung and SK Hynix. According to Korean sources, the two brands are drastically reducing the production of standard NAND memory in order to redirect their capacities to the more profitable DRAM chips and specialized accelerators for NVIDIA.
Well, if you hope that this is a temporary storm, analysts will disappoint you. The SSD market is currently repeating the painful scenario that RAM memory went through - a record price increase that will likely last until at least 2027. We've already seen popular models from Samsung and Western Digital almost double in price in a matter of months. So, as a journalist who keeps an eye on the pulse of technology, my advice is simple: if you find some left at a decent price, don't wait for "Black Friday." There probably won't be one for data storage in 2026.