going to have to hope compression gets a lot better because everything I’m seeing from both former coworkers (tech purchasers for big OEM) price forecasts are only going up, faster, and more vendors are stopping making ‘regular’ items and making things customized for AI datacenters which don’t work in COTS PC/Server tech.
Yeah - I fear it’s only going to get much worse for the next year or two. I listed to the Verge’s podcast on RAM the other week and their guest suggested that 2027 would be an optimistic timeline for more RAM production quantity to even come online and then even if that happens there’s the question of who that added quantity will be dedicated to - will consumer RAM get some of it or will most go to AI Datacenter projects…..sigh….
I am good with my system now but I know I’ll need more RAM in the next 1-2 years and I’m stuck with a DDR4 system which I don’t think is going to see ANY relief because it’s basically EOL. I had to bite the bullet and buy now but the price made me CRY. It was like $500 bucks for 64 gigs of basic, non-flashy, non-RGB, just….RAM. But I have no confidence it would be cheaper or easier to find in 12 months.
I don’t even want to look at HDD’s …but I’m hoping that price comes down a little easier and sooner….I’ve got 4x12TB and I either need to replace and expand to 4x20TB (or more) …or add another 4x12 for 8 drives total. Just praying none of my gear craps out or needs replacing anytime soon. Maybe I can ride out the bubble…
The DRAM will go wherever the profit margins are highest. None of those guys are in the charity business and Micron sent a pretty clear signal when they shut down their Crucial consumer brand. My guess is that this madness will continue until these guys run out of rocket fuel, aka investor funds.
Then, we will have a glut, just like in the post-Chia season when HDDs suddenly dropped well below $10/TB. Thing is, while we might all welcome that development from a NAS cost POV, it’s going to hit our 401K and like investments really hard because nearly all the growth in the S&P 500 has been in AI stocks, and those stocks now represent something ludicrous north of 30% of the S&P 500 total.
So when the AI bubble pops, expect a massive hole in your investment portfolio opening up.
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Well the DRAM Market today has 3 big players: Hynix, Samsung and Micron. And unlike last time the DRAM prices went through the roof, none of the 3 feels inclined to invest into stacking up their production capacities to increase market share on behalf of the other 2. They all fear the AI bubble might burst and they might be losing their investments when prices tumble down. So this time they are just cashing in big money as long as it lasts and be happy with it. The good thing is probably: the longer they do so the faster the bubble will burst. With the ever increasing demand for fast memory AI becomes more expensive and reaching a ROI way more difficult.
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If you want to preserve both the performance and longevity of your solid state devices, ensure that you disable the last access time on the drive. For Linux, that means setting noatime for the partition in fstab and for Windows run “fsutil behavior set disablelastaccess 1”. Naturally, it also works on TrueNas.
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Thanks! I’m on Windows, and after your tip i have checked this aspect, i have DisableLastAccess = 2 that (after a quick research) seems the default setting - and a good compromise. But i’m open to suggestion!
Btw, in my case i’m pretty sure that the controller just died, or some solder joints cracked: i have checked for shorts on capacitors (no luck 
could be an easy fix), and just plugging the disk into an usb adapter the controller temp start growing fast 
2026 will be a challenging year. We will need to improvise to pull through this. Do not engage in panic-buying! 
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Yeah, sticker shock for sure. I got a 2tb nvme for about $169.98 a year go, now over 500.
Gold. Platinum. Unobtainium…
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I imagine that the hardware to read and write data to a bar of gold will also add some capital cost and latency 
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Now, that was really expensive - i bought a 4TB Lexar NM790 M.2 2280 PCIe 4.0 x4 3D-NAND TLC for 229 € last April 2025 - it’s now for sale at 390 €.
More good news:
And we can expect CPUs to join the party:
TL;DR Intel has managed to reduce its losses by reallocating production away from the consumer division and towards the server division. But, contrary to Micron, Intel does not plan to completely shut down said consumer-facing division. The key word, of course, is “completely”. 
So expect less Intel Core on the shelves, to match the lack of RAM, storage and GPUs, and more Xeon 6 shipping to a data centre near-or-hopefully-not-so-near to you. Good that what we want for a NAS is a Xeon from a few years ago…
I wondered why I set noatime, it was in some howto and it made sense at the time, now I’m glad I followed it. I’m sure it was explained to my satisfaction at the time but doubly glad hearing about it from another source.
I guess I can take cold comfort in my cold spares… a year ago I thought I was just wasting money for fun, now it turns out I have appreciating assets.
I’d rather be able to go to the store & just buy something when a disk dies instead without the 8x price increases 
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It’s quite sobering to go to micro center here and find all sorts of stuff locked away as if you’re at a jewelry store - only to realize that pricewise, yes you are.
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I think the endgame is total control of all hardware, software, cloud etc. in the hands of 10 to 15 big tech companies. Just a wild guess…