I bought a PNY 2tb drive to upgrade my Steam Deck in August of 2025, it was $95 (USD). Today the 1tb version is $165, 2tb is $290.
just looked up my upgrade.
1TB bought in november 2024
Paid 74€ for it.
Similarly specced ssd costs 210€ today. Fucking hell
Edit: the exact same ssd costs 165-210€
We buy a decent amount of half TB SSD drives to add to desktop PCs that we sell to customers.
Samsung EVO drives have gone from $47 to $285 in the last year.
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!
Even worse is that I used to be able to get Crucial drives for less than Samsung, and I trust them way more. The Samsung ones are fine, but we've never lost a single Crucial SSD in 14 years.
I'll take a look at the PNY ones. We actually can use 256gb, since these are just backup drives that get a data dump every 5 minutes, so that may save some $.
From 12:48 of the video:
Gamers Nexus: "Were you able to lock in contracts for memory with the suppliers directly or did you have to jump through a bunch of hoops or..."
Rep from Valve: "Look there's no contract, there's nothing. Those guys...they are...they give us a price every month, and they say 'you can buy that many', and it's yes or no, and if we say no then they never talk to us again".
Gamers Nexus also links another video they made specifically about the DRAM cartel.
Actual fucking cartel.
This really bums me out not cuz I was looking to buy one but because I wanted it to shake the market up and make every company do better for the consumer... I feel like this price takes them completely out of the console market and purely into the entry-level PC market where I think it still is a decent specs and price for that market. It's just not what it was made to be
is it really that more expensive? because unlike a console the steammachine doesnt require a subscription to play online. PS5+ is 150€ yearly just for that. granted, you get a game per month but the games you get are often games you wouldnt buy anyways. so with the current price of 900€ for a 2tb ps pro youll pay 900€. after 3 years the steam machine is cheaper.
I hate micron so much now especially. They basically rug pull all consumers and only sell B2b now. So they can make more money on Ai datacenters.
Problem is there are only a few companies that even sell memory. And micron made it so much worse for the consumer market. I will not forgive, I will not forget.
Yes but giving up profits is not what a company does...
And you say forgive, as if they are your friend or something. Its a corporation. They don't give a fuck about you as a person.
Almost all corporations doesn't. There are exceptions. Kagi, the search engine, will give your monthly subscription money back if you didn't search during the month. How cool is that. That's someone who actually wants to provide a product users are happy with.
Is this a Kagi ad lmao
I really hope China or someone else can step up and just flood the entire market with cheap components eventually.
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.
Its always rough when you are dealing with a cartel..
This all so people can rot their brains out to fruit videos...
And so companies can fire the people who do the work (and hire them back later to fix the damage done by the agentic AI), too. Don't forget that part.
Hire them back at a lower pay none the less. People will and are desperate for work, so it won't be difficult.
fruit videos? is there a recent trend I missed?
Godawful AI generated soap opera featuring anthropomorphic fruits.
insert veggie tales meme about the future being AI generated
Damn the verge now just quotes GN? They may as well just link their video without writing anything, lol. They added nothing to this article.
Not that I can read much of it because of the paywall.
paywall
Probably doesn't help in this case, but check out Bypass Paywalls Clean :)
If you click "read mode" (im on librewolf but any firefox fork will do) you can access the whole article just fine.
My question is: how far back in time do we have to go to get to where RAM and SSD prices were this high (for a given capacity) in the past? Like 2021?
The last time we saw a price spike like this was when the Chinese adhesives factory caught fire and burned to the ground, those adhesives were used in all kinds of chips.
2013 - but even then it wasn't this bad.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/sep/06/china-fire-memory-chip-prices
There were also supply chain problems during Covid.
2020-2023:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405896322017293
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.
After reporting how much the Steam Machine costs, I could tell already. RAM manufacturers are in paradise right now!
If RAM prices are so bad, couldn't Valve give an option to order a Steam Machine with no RAM? So that people could use RAM they already have or buy some locally for a lower price.
The Steam Machine is intended to be plug&play.
I get where you're coming from. The average person doesn't know how to build a PC, and this is marketed as a plug and play device. Probably wouldn't be worth the support calls, returns, compatibility issues etc when people accidentally buy the wrong one.
The point of shitty old processors was to get them cheap. Now that RAM and storage are the biggest factors, they could have gone with newer processors and not be significantly more expensive but significantly more performant.
It's weird how supply chains work, and how design changes are at the very start of a very long process that makes changing the design now a very costly, risky thing.
Shitty, old processors? In which way?
Zen 4 is literally just a single generation behind current latest gen architecture. And you're way off on the pricing too - Zen5 APUs are essentially the AI 300/400 lineup, of which the higher end models still cost well over what Valve would find affordable. Meanwhile the GPU Valve chose to be integrated into the SM is 30-40% more performant than the 890M bundled with the Ryzen AI 370 (the only affordable kinda-high-end Zen5 APU).
So no, it's neither old nor shitty.
The entire cooling system is designed around those processors. Changing them would delay the Steam Machine by multiple years. Also, those processors may be old (or more accurately, based on an older architecture), but they’re certainly not shitty.
I feel sorry for them for the team that designed this. They had all this shit ready to go and then the RAM and SSD prices went through the roof, and tbh if you're speccing a machine for mass production, those seem like the bits that were always gonna be cheaper by the time it comes to actually building it. Why would they ever go up? They never have before.
It was a nice idea, but the timing had completely fucked it. I don't think it was ever going to compete with the PS5 on price, but right now it's barely even competing with PC on price...
Even the Steam Deck isn't competitive any more.
This is what shows in Steam when you search for it.
This is all you can buy.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
