Consumer NVMe SSD prices in May 2026 are roughly 40% lower than mid-2024. A 2 TB PCIe 4.0 drive that retailed at $180 in 2024 sells for $109 today; a 4 TB at $349 is now $189. Top-shelf PCIe 5.0 dropped from $400+ for 2 TB to $239. After the brutal 2022–2023 NAND shortage that crashed laptop sales and forced enterprise customers onto allocation, the supply side overshot. We're now in the mirror-image phase: a glut, with consumer builders the obvious beneficiary.
How the glut happened
The 2023 NAND shortage was severe — wafer pricing tripled at peak, lead times for enterprise SSDs extended past 6 months. In response, every major NAND fabricator announced fab expansions. Samsung broke ground on Pyeongtaek P3 NAND expansion. SK hynix accelerated its M16 fab. Kioxia and Western Digital (Kioxia's NAND JV partner) opened the Yokkaichi K2 fab. Micron brought its Singapore fab Phase 2 online. YMTC (Yangtze Memory Technologies), despite US export controls limiting its EUV access, expanded existing-node capacity.
Those fabs all came online between late 2024 and Q3 2025. By Q2 2025, NAND output exceeded demand for the first time since 2019. Spot pricing collapsed: 1 TB raw NAND wafer cost fell from $58 in mid-2024 to $32 by April 2026.
Where the savings landed
| Capacity / interface | Mid-2024 price | May 2026 price | Drop |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 TB PCIe 4.0 (mainstream) | $95 | $59 | −38% |
| 2 TB PCIe 4.0 (mainstream) | $180 | $109 | −39% |
| 4 TB PCIe 4.0 (mainstream) | $349 | $189 | −46% |
| 8 TB PCIe 4.0 (high-cap) | $799 | $429 | −46% |
| 2 TB PCIe 5.0 (flagship) | $409 | $239 | −42% |
PCIe 5.0 drops faster than 4.0 in percentage terms — early-adopter premiums collapsed as more controllers entered the market. PCIe 4.0 remains the volume sweet spot.
What it means for builders
- 2 TB is the new minimum for a primary OS+games drive. The price gap to 1 TB is small enough ($50) that compromising is the wrong call.
- 4 TB and 8 TB PCIe 4.0 drives are now within reach of mid-budget builds. Photographers, video editors, and game-libraries-of-100+ titles users should jump.
- PCIe 5.0 still commands a 30%+ premium for a sub-10% real-world performance win outside professional creator workflows. Worth it for: DaVinci Resolve 8K timelines, Blender catalogs, local LLM weights >40 GB. Not worth it for: gaming, web work, photo editing under 100 MP.
- NVMe enclosures: USB4 / Thunderbolt 4 external NVMe enclosures dropped to $79 (was $129). Portable 2 TB / 4 TB drives now make economic sense over Time Machine SATA.
What about HDDs?
Hard-disk drive pricing did not follow NAND down. A 4 TB 7200 RPM SATA HDD ($95) is now roughly the same price as a 2 TB SSD — and slower in every meaningful way. The capacity argument for HDDs only kicks in at 12+ TB; for primary storage in any modern build, HDDs are obsolete.
Endurance and warranty
Modern TLC NAND has improved real-world endurance. The 2 TB PCIe 4.0 drives in our durability tests handled 1,800–2,400 TBW (terabytes written) before retiring blocks — well past their 1,200 TBW warranty figures. QLC drives (DRAM-less, denser cells) write slower and wear faster; we'd still recommend TLC unless capacity-per-dollar at 4 TB+ is the priority.
Where prices go from here
NAND wafer capacity is locked through 2027 — the next expansion announcement cycle would bring new fabs online ~2028 at earliest. Demand from AI training and inference clusters (which consume enormous amounts of high-capacity enterprise SSD) is the 2026 wildcard. If hyperscaler buying accelerates, consumer pricing could firm up by Q4 2026. If their demand stays steady (or AI capex pulls back), expect another 10–15% drop through 2026.
The buy-now math: anything bought today below $0.06/GB is a generational-best price. Don't time the bottom; the gap to whatever low comes next is smaller than the cost of waiting on a slow drive.
See our best SSDs category page for the current sorted list, or the graphics-cards category if you're spending the SSD savings on a GPU upgrade.