While I was looking today I noticed Samsung drives have jumped way more than PNY have.

The PNY 512gb drives were $114, while like you said, Samsung is $285!

I just checked this today too. A year ago in June I bought two WD Blue 2,5" SSDs for ~165€, shipping included. Today the very same drive is 213€/each at the same store, before shipping.

Yes, the current tech industry has made computer hardware into drugs. It's a sellers market and the buyers that are ordering the largest amounts at the highest prices are AI and data center companies, everyone else gets the left overs at even higher prices.

They must be Nintendo fans too.

Saying “supply and demand” as if that settles the issue is reductive. It tells us prices moved, not why the market is structured this way. The real questions are what’s driving demand, who controls supply, and how concentrated power has become. When three suppliers and a handful of effectively unlimited buyers dominate the entire market, with weak or absent regulatory intervention, Econ 101 stops being analysis and starts becoming a thought-terminating cliché.

I'm not sure why you are getting down votes.

The reasons fur the demand sick, but you are correct, demand is fast outstripping supply..... Price rises are inevitable.

Well...but @MangoCats@feddit.it isn't asking about the spike, but about the absolute price.

PC Part Picker's memory trends page unfortunately only shows the past 18 months. But we can hit archive.org's Wayback Engine.

First of all, here's a current level for DDR5-5200 2x16GB:

So about $500 for DDR5-5200 2x16GB.

They only started tracking this category back in early 2022-ish. It looks like it was about $380 then. Adjusted for inflation, that's $435.14 in 2026 dollars. So it's probably never been that expensive.

However, that was also when DDR5 was pretty new, and it looks like it started out expensive.

If we look at DDR4, which might be more interesting, since we can go back further and avoid the initial spike:

Looking at DDR4-3200 2x8GB, it's come down a bit, but looks like it peaked at about $190.

Inflation-adjusted, that's $144 in 2019 dollars.

It looks like that was about April 2019 when DDR4 exceeded the peak from the last few weeks.

That's what I was thinking: early COVID, and it's not so much about the price spike relative to where it was, but the absolute dollars per GB pricing which has been persistently falling for decades - I doubt you have to go past 2021 to get to higher prices per GB, and that was for slower speeds too...

Yeah, over the years I tend to spend about $200 on storage when I buy - it's just that the storage has been getting bigger and bigger for that price over the decades.

On the DDR4 RAM front, it looks like pre-2019 is where RAM was higher than it is today, in (broad market measured) inflation adjusted dollars.

I can't wait for the bubble to pop.

Godawful AI generated soap opera featuring anthropomorphic fruits.

Hire them back at a lower pay none the less. People will and are desperate for work, so it won't be difficult.

They are trying. But there is a downside to everything. Once China has full function to basically replace the manufacturing of processors and memory in Taiwan they no longer have anything holding them back from bombing Taiwan into submission. And several incentives to do so to eliminate their competition. 🫩

Is this a Kagi ad lmao

There are exceptions. Kagi, the search engine

They're giving money to the homophobic brave search engine because it's "just politics" and also give money to russian yandex despite their invasion into ukraine

https://mastodon.social/@scy@chaos.social/111704636602291316

https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integration-due-to-the-geopolitical-status-quo/19

I prefer Bypass Paywalls Dirty 😈

thanks it's a bit weird to install but I'll get it done, I always wanted one that works after 5ftladder stopped working

Ohh that's neat!

plug memory, play games. plug and play.

It's not worth it to offer it. The steam machine is going to sell out regardless of the price, just like the steam deck did even after the price hikes. Not because there's going to be such demand, but because supply is still constrained.

A model without RAM is going to cost valve extra to support (troubleshooting and whatnot), so why bother when you can just sell the unit that comes with the RAM.