Samsung 990 PRO 1TB SSD price spikes amid NAND shortage

The NAND shortage has caused SSD pricing to spike

Forget the DRAM shortage; the NAND shortage has become the newest thing to ruin the affordability of PC building. A shortage of NAND memory has driven up SSD prices, raising the cost of all SSD storage. Today, a Samsung 990 PRO 1TB SSD costs £159.99 in the UK. According to PCPartPicker, I could have bought the same SSD for as little as £86.99 last year. That’s an increase of almost 84%…

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 only £9 (£168.99) more than the much older 990 PRO 1TB (PCIe 4.0). This should highlight how NAND pricing is the cause of SSD price hikes, not the cost of other components. 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.

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