A keen-eyed Reddit user caught a brainwave while browsing for high-capacity SSDs and was struck with the following thought: with the AI-infused silicon shortages, we've reached the point where NVMe gumstick-style SSDs are more expensive than gold by weight. The thread generated discussion aplenty, so we figured we'd dig into this and look up pricing and weight across a range of models. Spoiler alert: It's very much true for 8 TB drives and quickly heading there for 4 TB models.
We compiled multiple searches from Newegg, Microcenter, Best Buy, and Walmart, collecting over a hundred sample points. The requirements were: NVMe SSDs on a PCIe 4.0 or 5.0 interface, with four terabytes of capacity, sold by the store itself, and in stock. The selection excluded enterprise drives, as those would quickly throw off the math, plus everyone knows they are priced like antimatter anyway.
Collecting the average weight for these SSDs yields an average of 8.2 g for 8 TB SSDs and 8 g for 4 TB models. An eyeball look says that dual-sided, higher-capacity drives don't appreciably increase their weight. Needless to say, only models without heatsinks were considered.
8 TB SSD prices (USD) (Image credit: Future)
Gold is currently sitting at a shiny $148 per gram, so even picking the lower boundary of SSD weight at 8 grams, that makes your average SSD worth around $1,148. And guess what? The average price for an 8 TB consumer drive is around $1,476, and far higher than that if you want a performance unit instead of just a mass-storage model. So yes, at 8 TB, solid-state drives are indeed pricier than gold. But the story doesn't stop there.
Even 4 TB drives aren't immune to high pricing, with a portion of models now also hitting prices close to the equivalent in gold grams. Interestingly, there's definitely a strong divide between higher-priced units. Bar some exceptions, the majority of the sub-$800 space is made of mass-storage models, indicating that if you want both performance and capacity, be ready to loosen the purse strings.
There's also a divide by manufacturer, too. The upper echelons of the price ranks are filled almost exclusively by Western Digital (Sandisk) models, with relatively few offerings from competitors.
It's hard to read the tea leaves here. A cursory observation would state that WD is pricing itself out of the market, but it may be that WD drives are in high demand, and new stock is coming in at much higher prices. Anyone who's been shopping for SSDs recently certainly has noticed a rising trend overall, and PCPartPicker's price tracker illustrates this.
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PCPartPicker - 4 TB NVMe drive pricing trends (Image credit: PCPartPicker)
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