Why SSD and Hard Drive Prices Are Rising: Insights from Glyph’s VP of Sales
By Stephanie R
The rapid growth of AI infrastructure and data centers is reshaping the global storage market, causing significant increases in both SSD and hard drive prices. NAND memory, the core component used in SSDs, is now heavily in demand not only for storage but also for GPUs, CPUs, RAM, and large-scale AI computing systems. As major technology companies invest heavily in AI data centers, they are purchasing massive amounts of NAND supply, driving prices higher across the entire storage industry.
For creators, video professionals, and everyday consumers, this shift means storage costs may remain elevated for the foreseeable future. While high-speed SSDs are still essential for editing and high-performance workflows, traditional mechanical hard drives remain a reliable and cost-effective solution for long-term storage and archiving. As the industry adapts to rising demand, professionals are increasingly balancing performance and capacity by combining SSD speed with hard drive storage for more efficient workflows. Watch the full breakdown:
Read the transcript below:
This is William Warren the third for Productions LLC and we’re here at NRV to look at some solutions for problems in the digital age today. >> We know Glyph is an amazing amazing company especially when it comes to storage and things like that but you have an insight that most people do not have. What is your role for Glyph? >> I’m the VP of sales here at Glyph. I joined this organization about 2 years ago after working at Seagate and running the LI sales division over there for like the last 15 years. >> Prices of external hard drive have risen especially for people in production like like we are. >> Yeah. >> Um why do you why has that happened? >> Well, it’s not just the hard drive sector, William. It’s also the SSD space. So, what we’re seeing right now is the nan supply. That’s the dough. Okay. That’s needed to make SSDs. That same dough is also used in CPUs, RAM. It’s also used in GPUs. It’s also used in cache and memory all throughout the data center and in different computers and even your fridges and cars. And that NAND is needed for the new AI growth that’s being that we’re experiencing all across the world. And the if you look into the AI space, they’re building a lot of data centers and they have a lot of money. So they’re willing to pay a lot more for all of that NAND than all the other places. Because of that, it’s driving prices way up. We’ve seen effectively a tripling of SSD prices in the last 2 months. Now in the hard drive space, we’re seeing an increase there, too, because they do need those hard drives on the back end behind the SSDs inside the data center for the AI for the longer term cold storage, as we would call it. So that’s the data that that they’re going to call up at certain times versus living in the active SSD space inside the data center. So because of that, that’s driving hard drive prices up as they need that. But at the same time, I think the hard drive industry is kind of riding the coattails of just the SSD industry as the whole storage industry is taking this opportunity to reset storage prices. So they’re not such a commodity. Uh if you look into some press releases from some of the biggest nan manufacturers out there, they have stated that they will not be increasing uh supply to try to meet this demand because they want to course correct the commoditization that SSSE saw over the last 5 or 6 years. Um, you know, you if you prices might have skyrocketed for a lot of us, but if you look at our old 27 2017 price list, you used to pay $900 for a two TB SSD. So, while prices have effectively tripled over the last 2 months, they’re still not as bad as 2017, >> right? So, so, so what does this mean for like consumers and proumers? Like, how do they get affordable drives? >> Well, affordable drives that might be more challenging, but I consumers. I mean, what they need to do is buy now. If they want to buy, if they need storage in the next 9 to 12 months, I would argue you should have bought it yesterday. And the other best time to buy it is right now. I do not see the pricing headwinds that we’re seeing dissipating at all in the next in the remainder of 2026. >> Now, what does this does this mean that we’re going to some people that are actually proumers and consumers, does this mean we’re going to have to go back to mechanical hard drives? I think for some people, yes. Uh if you a I think a mechanical hard drive is a great solution for the everyday consumer out there. A lot of people have heard that, you know, SSDs are invincible, but SSDs are actually very susceptible to bit rot, which bit rot occurs when you just leave an SSD unplugged for too long. uh the firmware or the controller inside of an SSD, part of its job when it’s plugged in is to monitor the health of the cells inside of the SSD. Okay? And and you’ll hear that that SSD at times is referred to as a wafer. The reason they call it a wafer is because it’s an organic sub substrate that literally rots. So that controller needs to move the data cells from the unhealthy cells to healthy cells. But if it’s not plugged in, it doesn’t have that opportunity to. And that’s what creates bit rot. You’ll see that happen or occur when an SSD is sat on the shelf for too long. Anything over three years, you’re going to experience bit rot. And people see this a lot of times when they put their photos on thumb drives or old SD cards and they pick them up years later and they find that their files are corrupted. That’s a perfect example of bit rot. So, a hard drive is a great solution for the everyday consumer that’s looking to store 4K movies just to play them back, uh, music just to play it back, photos just to play back, or files, those are great solutions to put on a hard drive. But for video editors, video graphics, motions people, you know, uh, hard drive arrays like 8 arrays, 4 arrays can really amplify that speed through a RAID configuration. or you’re gonna have to just pay in more inflated prices for SSDs. >> Now you as VP >> for Glyph, >> what are some of the options and solutions you guys have in this time? >> Well, in the professional space, we have our new EX40 drive. It is the fastest external SSD you’ll find out there on the market. It’s a USB 4 drive. Comes in two, four, I’m sorry, 1, 2, 4, and 8 TB capacities. It has a max speed of 4,000 megs per second, but it sustains at over 3,000. Um, if you take a look at our speed chart that you can find on glyph.com, you’ll see that our USB 4 drive is outperforming all other brands USB4 and known Thunderbolt 5 drives on the market by two to three times in a one terabyte transfer test. It’s quite amazing. That all comes back to Glyph’s uh concern about using quality components at every aspect whether it’s from the cable to the IO interface to the thermal dynamics inside the product to the heat dissipation thermal tape to SSDs with high DRAM caches on them that come out of the enterprise space. >> For the regular consumer, >> does Glyph solve a problem for them as far as prices and things like that? Cuz it looks like we’re going to just we’re going to have to pay regardless. So, do we get more bang for our buck with Glyph? >> So, you do because the thing that’s great about Glyph is that we have a warranty that really fits the consumer uh in a like a glove. We offer one year of advanced replacement in that first year. So, if something were to happen out of the box, unfortunately, we overnight that person a new drive. Uh if something were to happen in the first two years that caused some sort of data loss, we will attempt a free data recovery for you, which could save you thousands of dollars. and we give you three full years of coverage in general as well. So, I think our warranty is a great value ad for a glyph hard drive for the everyday consumer. >> Wow. I appreciate this so much. Thank you and thank you for your solution in this hard time. We appreciate you. >> So, there’s so many issues that are happening digitally and we’re hoping that these solutions that have been given by Gliff and other people, they can help us out not only deal with the crisis but the quality of what we’re doing.