Why SSD Prices Just Exploded (And What to Do About It)

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]This video is sponsored by Squarespace.

[00:00:02]So, the price of these has skyrocketed.

[00:00:05]And honestly, it freaked me out because this is something that creators are constantly buying. We're repurchasing these as we're running out of storage space, and now we can't afford them. It felt like a shift. It felt like something was happening that I was unaware of, and I'm being pushed into a corner where I can no longer get access [music] to ways to store my footage. People liked these because you could drop them, and it was very unlikely that your footage would get corrupted or that these would break. So, these became very popular. They're also very small.

[00:00:34]They're also very fast. They're not a good long-term storage solution though, because they use electric signals. That means you got to keep plugging it in, and you got to keep using it, or everything's going to disappear. So, if you're letting this sit in a drawer, bye-bye footage. See you later. As you can see, I'm in my hotel room in Las Vegas heading to [music] the NAB convention, and I am going to get to the bottom of what's going on. Well, at least I'm going to get opinions. What is the best thing that creators like us should be doing right now to store and back up our footage immediately for workflow, and then long-term for storage, and then what does everyone think is going to happen in the next like 5-10 years? Cuz it's freaky. Is everything going to live in the cloud?

[00:01:15]Let's find out.

[00:01:22]So, the current price surge is actually driven by a massive supply and demand imbalance caused by the AI boom. So, they're literally using the same machines that are making the memory for SSD chips now making memory for the brains essentially for our AI models because the profit margins are 10 times higher. So, because these AI data centers are paying premium to secure storage, the price of SSDs has skyrocketed. Back at home, and let's do a little Amazon search, and I'm going to show you how much these SSDs cost. 1 TB $250, 1 TB $291, 2 TB $572.

[00:01:57]dollars. These two 4 terabyte ones, 639 dollars, 623 dollars.

[00:02:02]>> That's [music] about 200 to 300 dollars less than it was a couple years ago.

[00:02:07]There have been signs that a massive industry shift is underway. Almost all the major camera manufacturers have launched camera to cloud or a C2C initiatives. Now, while they all aim to get your footage off the card and into an editor's hands faster, they each take a slightly different approach. Right now, you have Adobe's frame.io, Sony pushing their Creators' Cloud and C3 Portal workflows, and Blackmagic Cloud deeply integrating directly into DaVinci Resolve. But, here's the [music] catch.

[00:02:33]These platforms are built as active collaboration tools for current and ongoing projects. They're completely temporary and they're definitely not designed for long-term storage. If you want to take that live workflow a step further, you can look at hot [music] storage spaces built for real-time cloud editing. I actually talked to the team over at Lucidlink recently and they ran through a product demo with me showing how seamless that pipeline can be. As you're filming, it gets sort of uploaded to Lucidlink. Right. And you can pull it into Premiere or whatever editing software you're using. And it's almost streaming from the cloud, like small chunks that you can edit with, and it's that fast.

[00:03:09]>> That's exactly right. Instead of bringing the entire 10 GB file down or larger file, we actually intelligently [music] bring down exactly the pieces that we need.

[00:03:21]>> It's actually a remote machine running Windows in Oregon. And here we are today in Las Vegas, of course. [music] But, if I go to the same file space called Team US, I'm going to navigate to that [music] same folder that we're looking at on my Mac. So, if I just take a file like this and drop it there, again, in Oregon, look what we're going to see show up here [music] within seconds, you know, thousands of miles away. But, I can actually open it up and start playing it. I'll just jump, you know, a little bit farther [music] in and hit play.

[00:03:47]This is playing while it's uploading from another state. So, the benefits of a cloud workflow are massive. [music] Your footage can automatically sync while you're still on set. No more stacks of loose SSDs. [music] You can collaborate with editors worldwide instantly.

[00:04:01]Clients can review cuts in real time, and AI can automatically tag your clips.

[00:04:05]It simplifies [music] production. But, once the project wraps, you still have to move those massive assets somewhere else. And that's where deep archive object storage comes into [music] play. So, that's platforms like Backblaze, Wasabi, and ultra-cold vaults like the AWS Glacier Deep Archive. Now, it's an incredibly attractive ecosystem, but it does have one massive downside.

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[00:05:18]Thanks, Squarespace. Now, back to the video. Think of physical storage like buying groceries and driving them home.

[00:05:24]You own them. They're in your kitchen.

[00:05:26]But, your fridge has a hard limit, and if you drop the bag on the way home, you lose all your groceries. The cloud is more like having a vacuum tube connected directly from the grocery store to your kitchen. And as you buy items, they instantly appear in your fridge. You never have to physically carry anything yourself. But, if your internet goes down, or you stop paying that monthly subscription fee, your access to your food is cut off. But, what does this mean for smaller creators like us? And this is why I'm making this video. The price of SSDs is too damn high. It is crazy. I don't like it.

[00:05:59]>> If you don't have an SSD, you're kind of SOL, I'm sorry. Cloud would be nice in some ways, but it never seems to quite work out the way you hope, you know? It just feels like we're in this weird limbo where we're not quite there yet, but we're going in that direction. I think the cloud is really helpful. I use cloud all the time with remote editing, but having everything live in the cloud only, I will I will never do. With this physical storage shortage, it feels like we're being forced or at least nudged in a certain direction, and [music] that's what scares me. Camera companies are moving towards a subscription model for essentially your own footage. By funding cloud over physical media, they are renting you the ability to access your work. The industry is trying to turn your footage into a monthly utility bill [music] in the sake of streamlining your workflow. And I don't need to do the math here to tell you that storing all your footage in the cloud as a content creator month-to-month would be insanely [music] expensive if you want access to all of it all the time and not just put in cold storage. I mean, even then you could have get hit with a download fee that's massive, and you're [music] subject to the internet speed. And right now, these platforms aren't built that way anyways. All of these cloud ecosystems are more per project giving your editor faster access [music] to the footage to start editing, share with the client, etc. So, for higher-end productions or even social media cuts, the cloud arguably pays for itself in time saved, for sure. But, my advice, look into building yourself a Synology NAS, which is a network attached storage system. I think right now, as creators, as filmmakers, having a NAS storage where you just put everything offloaded to in one safe place is the way to do it.

[00:07:28]>> Well, a NAS is effectively a cloud storage that you build and you manage on your own. It's a little bit expensive initially, but the long-term payoff, like over the course of a year or maybe even 2 years, you would completely pay it off, and then you're no longer dependent on the cloud. By putting high-capacity, budget-friendly, traditional hard drives into a NAS, [music] you get the best of both worlds.

[00:07:47]You get massive long-term storage capacity, the ability to access your files remotely from anywhere in the world, complete data redundancy if a drive fails, and most importantly, complete [music] ownership. It is an investment up front, but over time it is significantly cheaper than the alternatives. Having an SSD is still important. If I'm actively working on a project, I put it on an SSD, and then as soon as that project is done, I like putting it on a direct attached storage.

[00:08:14]The reason is it's a little bit safer, it's usually a little bit cheaper, it's easier to set up, and the nice thing about a direct attached storage is you can use Backblaze with it cuz Backblaze just recognizes it as a single drive.

[00:08:25]Backblaze, I think, is $12 a month for unlimited storage. So, if anything breaks, if anything dies, you can just download it from the cloud, or they'll send you uh hard drives in the mail, so you can replace all of your lost stuff. So, I'm a big fan of Backblaze uh for like my final archival backup because I basically can unlimitedly back up old footage and stuff, but that's not really the case with a lot of the cloud storage. So, it's really a limitation of how much storage video creators need to use right now, and I hope that in the next handful of years, the amount of storage that we need starts to get a little bit cheaper. I think that's probably the biggest thing that's stopping most people from pushing fully into more cloud storage for anything that they're not currently working on.

[00:09:12]So, you don't have to use the cloud, but as [music] SSD prices stay high, the convenience of the cloud is going to start looking like a financial necessity rather than a luxury. We just don't know when. Thank you so much for watching this video. If you liked it, please give it a like down below, subscribe if you're not already, and hit the notification bell to get notified for all future videos, and I will see you in the next one. [music] Going to go download my footage onto an SSD, and then eventually put it on my NAS, and it cost me a small fortune.

[00:09:38]Not the cloud, though. Not the cloud.

[00:09:42]For the first time, I'm kind of just deleting a lot of stuff. I'm not saving a lot of stuff. Whereas before I would save everything, now I'm just deleting.

[00:09:47]It's too expensive to hold on to it and it feels like I'm just a digital hoarder, so delete all is the answer.