Its mainly AI and data centres using it all up on someone else’s dime. Trump, tariffs, inflation and supply chains are another part of it, but it’s mainly AI. Give it time. Either the AI data centre splurge will collapse and those will be sold crashing the market, or they won’t and it’s a stable market and production capacity will increase, hopefully bringing prices back down,

Probably not gonna get better for a few years, the cheapest options I found are PS5/PS4 external HDDs and regular external “rugged” HDDs - 1tb for around 100 euros and 2tb for 120-140

I had been wanting for the last few years to build a proper home server, and to build a new gaming PC.

Gaming PC has been out of the question for a while now. Crypto led into AI, plus all thr nonsense the manufacturers have been pulling. I had a brief hope last year that the AMD 9070 or 9070XT might be reasonable, but alas the MSRP was completely fake.

Then the RAM prices increased from AI. I had an old machine cobbled together from 2013-2014 budget gaming PC’s, and it had 16GB of DDR3, so I turned that into my server. Slapped in a 1TB SATA SSD that I probably got around d 2022-ish and that would get me by until the market corrects and I can build a proper server, right?

Well then the drive prices started to climb. First the SSD’s because the NAND was being diverted to RAM, then the HDD’s because of the lack of SSD’s and the rise of data centers using them. The resty of my server may be old (so reliability is a concern) but its got plenty of performance for what I use it for. So this time I decided to try to buy on the upswing and get the HDD’s. I ended up spending a little over $1k for two WD 24TB NAS drives. One of them was DOA. After over a month of phone calls and emails with both B&H and WD, I eventually got a replacement from WD.

B&H at first offered to let me just send the drive back and replace it, but they were completely out of 24TB drives and wanted me to pay $200 to upgrade to the 26TB drive. Which was completely ridiculous because I was RAID’ing them, so either I pay a ton more for no extra effective storage or I pay like $400 more to do both drives and get 2TB of effective (albeit redundant) storage.

So instead I went through WD. Took a long time- they didn’t ship a drive for 2 weeks after they received my defective one. When I followed up, the impression I got fro the representative was that they were trying to find a drive to send me. Eventually one came in the mail: they just went ahead and sent me a 26TB drive at no cost. It seems even WD themselves was completely out and didn’t think they would be able to get another one anytime soon. On PCPartPicker now, the 24TB drive is listed at $670 a piece and completely out of stock everywhere

That’s absolutely wild to me. Part of the reason I went with 24TB drives I the first place was that the smaller ones in the 16-20 TB range were sold out.

I used to think I could just wait it out. I built PC’s for my wife and I in 2019 and early 2020, each with an RX580. Covid hit and I thought “wow I’m glad I bought those when I did”. Then the Crypto boom hit and I thought “wow once this bubble bursts I should try to upgrade”. Then AI happened. At this point I don’t have any hope anymore. I truly believe these manufacturers have former a cartel and have effectively bribed enough government officials of thr most powerful and relevant global economies. The goal is to end personal computing and instead move to lightweight clients with cloud subscriptions. In 45 years, I’m going to be the weird old dude trying desperately to maintain his 50 year old hardware, scavenging estate sales for parts.

If you can live with rotational storage for whatever you’re doing, those prices haven’t moved as much as SSDs, though they are going up now too (probably people who would have bought solid state storage switching to rotational drives).

<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/01b14941-13ef-4a79-bc25-3101a2203d0d.png">

Memory prices are expected to start coming down in 2028, when more production capacity starts coming online, and it sounds like to some extent, manufacturers can shift capacity between DRAM (like, DIMMs/HBM) and NAND (flash), so I’d imagine that you won’t see any substantial improvement in SSD prices prior to 2028, since they’ll be trying to sell as much DRAM to AI companies as possible given available capacity.

EDIT:

Is this because of donald trump and/or AI?

AI. Trump’s tariffs generally negatively impact prices Americans pay, since they create a barrier to importing goods to the US. Assuming, from your home instance and the prices that you’re listing, that you’re in Canada, if anything, Trump imposing tariffs will tend to decrease costs on things for Canadians, since they’ll tend to cause Americans to purchase less of that thing, reducing demand for it on the international market. Less demand, all else held equal, reduces market prices.

(There are some exceptions, like where an input is imported to the US and then used to manufacture something and exported to Canada, but searching, it looks like the US doesn’t presently manufacture NAND memory.)