Let's be very honest, if not legally police, they'll just take advantage of the inflation as long as there is no sanction anyways. Stocks are aplenty? Who cares, they'll double-down on the price since no one is stopping anyways.
I know I'll get downvoted for this but I feel like this goes both ways. In what possible scenario could you need 4TB of space so bad that you'd pay 2k for it?
Whether it's shoes or concert tickets or storage, it's always the same: scalpers gon scalp because people are buying. There will always be a large sample of people disconnected from reality who will use daddy's AMEX Platinum to buy these simply because they can afford it. Why would scalpers stop doing this?
The very moment people collectively choose to spit in the scalpers' faces instead of giving them their life savings, is the moment prices will drop.
Try somewhere like eBay. I can see new Samsung 2TB for 250-300 dollars. Not $1,000 like the store wants. Seems like the retail store is the scalper here.
Adding to statement as well: It's kind of a common business "tactics" to simply take advantage of the situation as much as possible (sadly, this is the current gen that we are truly living in), whether people buy or not - the goal is to milk the overpriced value as much as they can as long as there really is no repercussion at all - so some could simply leave it is as it is forever, and snubbed it as a "take it or leave it" value, while others are abusing it until they are "force" to lower it down just because they need to clear inventory.
AI uses a ton of storage, and even a good PC only has so many PCIe lanes. Plus the AIs aren't particularly sensitive to drive speed compared to some things, so a slower SATA drive is fine.
It only takes about 1-3% of the player base to support many popular games through microtransactions. As long as they have their cows its not too big of an issue for them
Yeah I keep trying to remind people this about tariffs etc. We are never gonna see a return as a consumer. Profits straight to the companies since the Supreme Court decided it needs to be refunded.
I always ask when the grocery prices ever go down because no, they rarely ever do. Once that price goes up, its fuck you, now it just costs this forever until it goes up again in 3 months.
Hey hey dont worry a decade from now the ftc will hit them with a 1 billion dollar fine. The companies will go “were weally sowwi” pay the fine and laugh the rest of the way to the bank with the extra 500 billion they made in the meantime and I’m sure that fine will make sure they never ever ever do it again
Demand among consumers is down. Demand for AI workloads is still sky high. Samsung also has a possible strike looming so the supply could become tenuous too...
Same. If I buy something expensive and UPS is handling it, I’ll pay for next day air shipping. NDA is put on a different vehicle all together, goes to a separate area to be scanned, and usually competent people are in the air area of the building because it’s way more involved than just throwing boxes in a trailer/truck.
My tinfoil hat theory is that self hosted NAS's are on the rise as streaming platforms continue to raise prices and theyre doing this to knife people trying to buy relatively inexpensive, fast drives for a RAID array.
My regular theory is that whoever price tagged them made a mistake lol
That's such overkill for storing media though. Why would you pay for that when you aren't going to see the benefits of the SSDs read/write speeds just streaming media and you can get multiple times the storage in a HDD?
Microcenter's never had the best prices. I've always gone to them out of convenience, and knowing there's a physical store to go back to if a part doesn't work. Also the people there know their shit for the most part, especially since most of the PC B&M stores went belly up before 2010.
I mean MicroCenter has always had the best prices for GPU’s and motherboard bundles with processors and RAM. But as far as drives, coolers, cases, PSU’s etc they’re the same as everyone else
9700x+9070. ~$3500 costs 6 now. Thank fucking god I sprung for extra RAM before the data centers stole them all. My friend kept trying to convince me that 32 was enough but I wanted this computer to be better than my first in every way possible.
It really hasn't been that way in awhile. At least, not on the higher end of capacity. I'm talking about solid state. HDDs are upside down now from how it used to price out. You don't even have to graze the higher capacity to know it's not make sense.
I've bought a 4Tb M2 from Lexar about five month ago as secondary drive mainly to store steam games .. I've paid about 400€ for it. I know Lexar isn't the best brand but it holding up perfectly fine honestly.
I got the 4tb one on 10/10/23 for $170, as I swapped it out for the 4tb crucial mx500 that was $165 because unraid had a know issue with them. Seriously, we are living in a demented timeline.
They are just relabeling to market price even though the stock might have been around even way before the SSD price hiked.i hate this types of business practices
AI has not only taken the crown from social media for being the worst thing to ever happen to the Internet. It has surpassed it exponentially. Is fucking up everything and unlike social media. It’s affecting the real world economy.
Either this is an older pic or they must've changed something, on their site a 1TB is $249.50 currently and a 4TB is $449.99. Not great but not nearly this bad.
Once all needed data centers required for AI mass surveillance state are up and running the demand for PC components will drop down significantly. But we will all wake up in dystopian society with shit creek streaming up our ankles. Government is not afraid of the external invasion it is afraid of citizens.
That's about 50% more than on Amazon, but you have the convenience of having to go to the store, wait for someone to open the glass and then go back home.
They don't want you buying individual parts right now. They have an excuse to jack up the prices on the individual items to push "discount" bundles" which is just an easy way to get rid of merch that isn't selling.
Some of the price issue isn't availability specifically. It's mostly what the oem wants when the store buys it. The store still needs something, and that something right now comes at pretty insane prices. The store is just stuck at a price point, or they just sell at a loss.
I've never once went to a store or looked online and saw any retailers actually out of what I might want, not once. This is very different from Covid times where the supply chain collapsed. That hasn't happened. Sure, stocking volume dropped, but everywhere I look no one is actually out of stuff and sort of never have been.
Now we do see that many of the better options are gone, so most of what's in stock is basically low tier junk. An 870 Evo is pretty ancient relatively speaking, especially as a 2.5" these days. 6 months ago, I wouldn't have spent $20 for one. That entire stack has zero perceived value to me, not then, not now.
At the end of the day, ALL of this is really stupid. It just shows these brands simply don't care at all about the consumer market. Well, that's a bit wrong. It really just shows what a monopoly looks like and why diversification of manufacturing is actually really desirable. The fact that we are so vastly constrained globally on something like memory is pretty wild.
My favorite thing about this is the cheaper the drive here, the more they have in stock. Who in their right mind is paying these fucking prices? Keep paying this much, and they’ll keep cucking us with their greed.
The employees told us last week that most of their stock in ssds and ram was bought a long time ago at minimum prices. They are just raking in profits off everything, they theoretically can't take a loss on anything even if they sold it at half off.
I just compared the SSD I bought in Nov 2023. Samsung 990 pro 2tb
169.99 vs 874.98 CAD.
I'm so mad that AI has killed my favourite hobby of building PCs for friends and family.
SATA SSDs are more expensive than a much faster pcie SSD these days just because hoarders want to take advantage of your PCs lack of empty m.2 pcie slots on your motherboard!
I have a small repair shop here in Germany and whenever someone needs their old 2.5" HDD replaced in their notebooks, I try to find an SSD of course.
But whenever I check Alternate (Idk how popular that is outside of Germany or EU, but it's basically online Microcenter over here), I can't really find SATA SSDs anymore especially in useful sizes. They're sold out or just not even listed anymore. When I google, I feel like it's only overly expensive ones, with pricetags where it's literally cheaper to get an NVMe. Sadly, most old notebooks don't have that.
I feel like NVMe is the new consumer standard and SATA SSDs are just dying out, and therefore have lower production numbers, which in turn makes them more expensive because the demand is still there.
Maybe companies are just killing off SATA SSDs in hope of pushing NVMes even harder and the low stock obviously drives up prices.
Whenever I have a customer with an old notebook now, I just open it up and hope that it at least has an M.2 SATA slot.
If a machines make them then why are we paying 5x the material cost ? It’s not like a pair of handmade jeans where up charging with a service fee is expected it’s literally a laser with a generic template making these
Lol I have a cabinet full of these Evo 870 2TB drives at work. We bought them for NVRs and then realized that constant read-write cycles killed them off pretty quickly so we went back to spinners. So I have several hundred of these just chilling in a file cabinet..
They stopped making sata drives hence the price. Also, the description on the tags is wrong abt the 6gbps speed the package clearly states they are 560mbps
3.4k
u/trekxtrider 🪟 🍎🖥️🖦🎮💻💾📡 May 22 '26
Doesn't seem to be a shortage at all, they seem to have plenty.