SSDs now cost 16x more than HDDs due to AI supply chain crisis — hybrid SSD + HDD datacenter deployments are now significantly cheaper to deploy than SSD-only equivalents
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The memory/NAND flash shortage is continuing to chew up the storage market without mercy. VDURA reports (from Blocks and Files) that SSD prices are now a whopping 16 times greater than HDDs, making hybrid storage deployments with SSDs and HDDs mixed together significantly cheaper and more financially stable than SSD-only setups for datacenters.
VDURA claims that between Q2 2025 and Q1 2026, pricing for 30TB TLC enterprise-grade SSDs increased by an eye-watering 257%. A 30TB TLC SSD that cost $3,062 in Q2 of 2025 now costs nearly $11,000. By contrast, HDD pricing reportedly "only" went up by 35% in the same timeframe. VDURA's analysis also revealed that datacenter storage costs between SSD and HDD capacity went from 6.2x in Q2 2025 to 16.4x in Q1 2026.
(Image credit: VDURA (through Blocks and Files))
The datacenter storage software provider compared a mixed fleet storage system featuring servers equipped with HDDs and SSDs to an equivalent SSD-only setup. The 3-year ownership cost of the mixed setup was a quarter of the cost of the SSD-only setup — $5.99 million compared to $25.20 million.
Understanding this pricing disparity will be critical for datacenter customers and analysts over the next few years. VDURA reports that the skyrocketing divergence in SSDs and HDDs has forced enterprises to create new server budgets from scratch based on information from months-old storage quotes that are now obsolete. Moving any new or existing servers from an SSD-only setup to a hybrid setup composed of SSDs for caching and HDDs for long-term storage will also help datacenters save money.
VDURA's report backs up what we are seeing across the entire storage industry. SSDs are now so expensive that high-capacity 4TB and 8TB consumer M.2 SSDs are roughly the same price as gold, and that's not even counting enterprise drives. NAND flash providers such as Kioxia predict that the SSD shortage will likely extend into 2027, as demand far outclasses supply.
Hard drives are not immune, either: despite their lower prices compared to SSDs, hard drive availability is reported to be on backorder for two years due to AI demand. This problem is translating into higher HDD prices as we speak, as HDD prices have increased by 46% since September.
But SSD's are still 100x better for daily use. I don't even like mechanical drives for video or backup storage unless I'm not going to power up the drive for years (SSD data loss). I've spent too much of my life waiting for data transfers.
Almost, if you're referring to maximum read/write speeds. My fastest HDDs reach 250MB/s, but a Gen.5 WD SN8100 NVMe peaks at 14,900MB/s on sequential reads, so that's nearly 60x faster than my HDD. I agree booting and running Windows from HDD seems incredibly SLOW.
Zaranthos said:
I don't even like mechanical drives for video
When I'm playing back 4K videos on my media PC, I don't notice any difference if they're on SSD or the 8TB HDD.
During long 4K video transcodes, I use 3 NVMe drives to keep Windows, Scratch files and Work-in-progress files separate. But on completion, I transfer the multi Gigabyte files to hard disks in desktop PCs.
Zaranthos said:
or backup storage
For backup storage I use four RAID-Z2 TrueNAS servers full of HDDs.
For archives it's LTO cartridges, which can sometimes survive longer than hard disks. Tapes are also less susceptible than online SSDs to ransomware. N.B. I'm not running anything fancy like super expensive LTO-8 or LTO-9.
With recent storage price increases, I'm far more likely to buy a new 8TB HDD than an 8TB NVMe, when upgrading a PC.
What's funny is that just the other day I read a story in TheRegister, where they argued that the NVMe shortage was actually due to AI datacenters not being able to buy spinning rust and turning to SSDs in sheer despair!
Makes little difference to consumers holding their bag, one way or another.
I got all the storage and compute I'll likely need for years to come, but it still makes me very uneasy knowing that I'd not be able to afford to replace anything that fails...
Helpful article. I was looking at a 2TB SSD the other day and it was like $250 USD equivalent. Maybe I need to lean into cloud storage more. Get the feeling my next PC will be second-hand at this rate.
Yeah, wrong about HDD pricing. They have at least doubled since Q1 2025. The very best price on spinning rust is over 2 cents per GB. A year ago it was hovering around 1 cent.
Their costs haven't increased. They are just raising prices because they can.
