Memory crisis: there are already NVMe SSDs that are “worth more than gold”

The rise in memory prices will apparently get worse before showing any signs of improvement, so we will see products that use the components reach increasingly surprising standards. One of them has already appeared this week, with certain models of NVMe SSDs already becoming more expensive than gold.

The comparison, obviously, is relative. The conclusion is obtained by comparing products by weight. 8TB NVMe SSDs weigh, on average, 8.2g, and we already have examples of these drives costing more than 8g of gold.

The topic started on Reddit, so Tom’s Hardware did a more detailed investigation, resulting in the chart we see above. The comparison was made with gold costing US$148 (R$795) per gram. Thus, 8g of gold was costing US$1,184 (R$6,363) on average. With 8TB NVMe SSD models costing, on average, over US$1,400 (R$7,524), we can say that they are already more expensive than gold.

To make matters worse, some 4TB models also appear to be surpassing the gold price line. The overwhelming majority of products are still well underpriced, but with the market trend far from optimistic, these first drives passing the barrier could indicate that we will soon have more examples.

How high are SSD prices?

An important feature of the hardware product market is that we often see exponential increases in prices. The rapid increase in value can make more people buy before the numbers rise further, which ends up speeding up the entire process.

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With 4TB NVMe SSDs starting to cross the “gold line”, the trend is getting worse. The graph above, made by PCPartPicker, shows how these drives took a turn at the beginning of December and a new, even more pronounced turn in January. We will likely see more of these jumps in the coming months.