SSD prices are already daft, and Samsung and Kingston have decided that now is the perfect time to whack them up by about 10 per cent.
Those Micro Centre shelves stacked with high-end drives costing thousands of dollars are heading for even sillier price tags, and budget gaming PC builds are getting mugged.
Samsung has sent out a price adjustment notice for SSD products, with increases said to exceed 10 per cent.
It has told three major domestic distributors that its cost prices have formally risen.
IT Home Source Bobantang wrote: “At the same time, Kingston announced yesterday that all SSD products across its lineup will implement a unified price increase starting this week, with adjustments of no less than 10 per cent.”
It said that supply chain chatter indicates Samsung and Kingston have issued official notices covering their whole SSD line-ups.
The expectation is at least a 10 per cent bump, which is a polite way of saying your next upgrade is going to sting.
That puts drives like the Samsung 990 PRO 1 TB, already priced at $300 to $330, on track to hit nearly $330 to $360.
A 1 TB 990 Pro used to sit for less than $100 last year, and now it is pushing three to four times that, like nothing happened.
This is being pitched as the second quiet price nudge this month, with Samsung and Western Digital previously hiking high-end M.2 SSD pricing hard.
Prices jumped fast worldwide, and some 8 TB models are reportedly selling for more than $4,000.
The story being whispered is NAND flash supply constraints, because retail demand alone does not usually pull this sort of stunt.
That would explain why every refresh feels like someone is charging rent on your PCIe lanes.
The knock-on effect is ugly for gamers, who do not want to settle for sub-1 TB of storage, even if they are willing to skimp on RAM.
OEMs are already leaning on higher SSD and RAM costs to bump system pricing, with LG’s Gram laptops getting hit by as much as $400.
AI infrastructure demand keeps warping the storage market, with vendors chasing server orders instead of shoppers trying to build a decent rig without selling a kidney.