Get Ready For Some Deals As RAM And SSD Prices Are About To Fall

There’s good news if you’re about to update your workstation. It looks like both RAM and SSD prices are about to plummet, and we’re all going to be the winners as a result.

As you probably know, your pocketbook can get raked over the coals when it comes to either of these upgrades, even if it’s from a bargain supplier like OWC. If you’re buying the latest iMac, for instance, Apple will charge you $200 per 8GB of additional RAM. MacSales, on the other hand, is charging an affordable $70 for 16GB, and those prices could drop even more.

Solid State Drives (SSDs) now sit at between $90 and $130 for a 1TB drive, but higher capacity drives are still somewhat expensive per TB. Expect those prices to drop soon though.

The reason is that right now there’s a huge surplus of memory-based products on the market. It seems that data centers and enterprise customers stocked up on every available RAM and SSD product at the beginning of the pandemic, and they’re not buying now as result. That means the manufacturers have excess supplies and are about to dump them on the market. The expectation is that prices will drop by about 15% in the coming months.

Prices were bound to fall anyway as new memory technologies hit the market. This is especially true for higher capacity SSD drives (4TB or more), which are still pretty expensive right now at around $500. That’s a lot compared to a similar hard drive, which is in the $100 range.

I recently switched completely over to SSDs as my working drives and I can’t believe how much everything sped up. The only thing I use hard drives for these days are backup, and that now seems excruciatingly slow as a result. Not only that, the noise of the drive (something that you probably didn’t even notice before) is so much more prominent against the totally silent SSDs.

So keep an eye on those RAM and SSD prices. You can be sure that there will be some great deals available come Black Friday.

---