- SSDs have shot up in price over the past month and a half
- Tom’s Hardware compared the cost of some top-end SSDs against 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 a few 4TB models are, too
If you’ve ever wondered whether SSDs are more valuable than gold, gram-for-gram, in weight terms – and some folks have, following price inflation driven by the memory crisis – the answer is, rather incredibly, yes, for capacious high-end drives, anyway.
Tom’s Hardware reports that a Reddit discussion sprang up around this topic, and our sister site ran some comparisons of the relative cost-to-weight ratios of 24k gold versus certain NVMe SSD models.
Those are the compact stick-style SSDs, of course, 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 in danger of having the plug pulled by a major manufacturer, Samsung, as you may have seen recently.)
To work this out, Tom’s collated a list of SSDs (over 100) from major US retailers (Newegg, Microcenter, Best Buy, and Walmart), which were all PCIe 4 or 5 models with at least 4TB capacity (and currently in stock). These were all consumer models, with pricey enterprise drives (laden with a bunch of extra bells and whistles), not considered as they’d throw out the overall value equation.
And obviously, no SSD with a heatsink was included as that ramps up the weight a lot (which averaged around 8 grams for 4TB models, and only slightly more at 8.2 grams for 8TB drives).
With the 8TB models, Tom’s worked out 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 compiling the comparison.
So, these top-end SSDs are more than worth their weight in gold, quite literally.
As for the 4TB SSDs, they aren’t there yet with their average price, but a few of the very top models edge past the price of the equivalent weight in gold.
Analysis: storage pain
Storage is unfortunately following in the footsteps of RAM. While the price of SSDs hasn’t shot up as much as system memory has, matters have already gotten pretty bad.
Tom’s shows us a graph of 4TB NVMe drive pricing from PC PartPicker, and you can clearly see that prices rose considerably in December, and there’s been an even sharper uptick in the first half of January. Hence, this eyebrow-raising comparison to the price of gold, and it’s even worse with faster 8TB models.
Where are we headed 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 a climb.
So, if you’re needing an SSD for an upgrade or a new PC build, you may want to pull the trigger on a purchase sooner rather than later (no matter what the size, but certainly with top-end models). For example, you can still get a Samsung 9100 Pro for $600 at Newegg in the US, and while the same drive was $400 on sale for Black Friday just a couple of months ago, odds are it could increase in price at a rate of knots from here on out.
Looking at our favorite SSD, the WD Black SN8100, the 2TB model was $220 during Black Friday, but is now – wait for it – $499 on Newegg. Ouch. Western Digital models seem to be riding the crest of the price hikes, Tom’s observes, though that could partly relate to the popularity of the drives and how fast stock is selling through as a result.
It’s nasty out there in storage land right now, but it could well get worse – and it very probably will. Meanwhile, we might see some creative solutions floating around, and as we made clear earlier this week, those who are on the hunt for an SSD for their PS5 could look at an alternative way to fix their storage predicament.
The best SSDs for all budgets
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