Samsung 990 PRO 1TB SSD price hits over £200 amid NAND shortage
The NAND shortage is causing SSD pricing to spike
The DRAM shortage has hit the PC market hard, but rising NAND prices are forcing further price increases. The growing NAND shortage is impacting the affordability of new PCs, driving SSD prices up to insane levels. Today, a Samsung 990 PRO 1TB SSD costs £209.99 through Amazon UK. According to PCPartPicker, I could have bought the same SSD for as little as £86.99 last year. That’s an increase of over 138%…
Even SATA SSDs have seen their pricing rise dramatically, despite their low speeds compared with more modern NVMe SSDs. Why? Simply put, it’s that it’s NAND that’s making these SSDs expensive, not their controller or storage interface.
Strangely, Samsung’s faster 9100 PRO 1TB (PCIe 5.0) SSD costs £219.99 through Amazon, just £10 more than the much older 990 PRO 1TB (PCIe 4.0). This should highlight how silly the SSD market has become. Both SSDs use 1TB of NAND. That means that both will be very expensive.
It’s worse for higher-capacity SSDs
With NAND being the cause of these price increases, higher-capacity SSDs have seen the largest price increases. 8TB SSDs have practically become unobtanium within the consumer PC market, with pricing often exceeding £900.
Between high DRAM pricing and high SSD pricing, 2026 is a bad time to build a PC on a budget. PC builders will either need to spend more money to upgrade their systems or get significantly worse hardware than the same budget would purchase in mid-2025. As we have said many times before, this PC pricing crisis has been caused by the rampant buildout of AI datacenters. The greed of the AI industry has made consumer electronics much more expensive, especially for those who want PCs with lots of RAM and plenty of storage.
You can join the discussion on Samsung 1TB SSDs being available for over £200 on the OC3D Forums.
