Against the backdrop of the AI craze and the resulting shortage of NAND flash memory chips, SSD prices continue to rise rapidly. how Report Blocks & Files resources cited analysis by the US company VDURA (which develops software-defined infrastructure for data storage and management). In July 2026, the cost of solid-state drives increased by 5% compared with the previous quarter. This number has soared 6.5 times in one year.
In particular, a TLC SSD with a capacity of 30 TB currently sells for about $22,600. For comparison: In the third quarter of 2025, the cost of such equipment was $3,460. Likewise, the price of a QLC drive in a given capacity has risen from $2,768 to $18,080 over the past year.
VDURA points out that the price of HDDs has also increased at the same time: in July this year, the price of such solutions (such as SSDs) increased by about 5%. The cost of a 30 TB drive has increased 2.5 times annually, from an average of $495 to $1,216. As a result, TLC SSDs now cost 18.6 times more than HDDs of the same capacity. This is down from the peak of 23.2x in the first quarter of 2026, but significantly higher than last year’s level of 7x.
Image source: VDURA
VDURA’s senior vice president of products and operations said that flash memory price fluctuations are no longer erratic, but have stabilized at a level that broke the previous economic model of all-flash storage architecture. He said that against the background of 6.5 times annual growth, 5% growth in one month is not a temporary phenomenon, but a reality that all companies implementing projects in the field of cloud and AI factories must consider.
VDURA believes that in the current situation, companies should adopt a hybrid approach to building data storage systems. For example, a platform with a capacity of 25 PB has a steady-state read speed of 1000 GB/s in a cluster of approximately 2000 GPUs. When using only a 30 TB TLC SSD, the total cost of ownership over three years would be $51.6 million. Taking QLC SSD as an example, the figure is estimated at $48.42 million. When deploying a hybrid system with a total capacity of 5.78 PB of SSDs and a total capacity of 22.68 PB of HDDs, the three-year cost of ownership will be $12.86 million. This is equivalent to a gain of four times compared to an all-flash architecture.
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