Hard drives, RAM, and SD cards have skyrocketed in price over the last six months as memory-hungry AI data centers consume even more silicon wafers in pursuit of a workable business model. As with most rug pulls, consumers like you and I are left holding the bag (in more ways than one), which so far means the price of memory.
It’s Prime Day though, and there are some deals that bring prices back down to something like reality. The best I’ve seen is on Samsung’s 2-TB 990 Evo Plus SSD, which is down to $370. Is that an outstanding deal? Well, yes and no. Abstractly, no, it’s not. A year ago this drive was selling for $140. Six months ago it was still only $300.
But we live in the real world, and in the real world this drive has spent the last two months hovering at well over $600, so knocking almost $300 of that makes this a deal, such as it is. Given that there’s no sign of stopping the AI bubble, I also fully expect this to be lowest price you’ll see the rest of the year.
The Samsung 990 Pro SSD is our top pick bare hard drive in our guide to SSDs. The NVMe M.2 PCIe drive achieved speeds of 7,458 MB/s reads in my testing, more or less matching the claimed 7,450 MBs / 6,900 MBs read/write speeds. That kinds of speed makes this drive ideal for intensive tasks, like editing video or gaming. Just promise me you won’t run a local AI on it. Please, don’t encourage them.
The deal I’ve linked to here is the 2-TB version, but there is a 4-TB version available for $885 and a 1-TB version on sale for $220. There are faster drives on the market, but I find that beyond the speed of this drive, there is a diminishing return in the speed vs price curve, especially these days. I’ve been using this one as my main drive for several months months now and it works great for editing 5.2K video footage from my GoPro and compiling software. My favorite part? It generates very little heat.
The good news about SD cards is so far they haven’t taken off quite like SSDs or RAM, though they are definitely going up in price, though for the most part they’re still reasonable.
While there are cheaper SD cards to be found, this is the only SD card I put in my cameras and has been the only SD card I’ve shot with for going on ten years now. I have one card that dates from 2017 or so and is still going strong (knock on wood), which I can’t say about any other brand or SD card. Lexar’s gold cards are plenty fast (I’ve shot 6K video on these cards with no issue) and offer enough storage (up to 512 GB) for even the most demanding users.
If this one is still a little steep for your budget, the Lexar Silver cards are on sale as well, with the 128-GB version going for $49 ($16 off). The Silver aren’t nearly as fast, which is why they’re so much cheaper, but they’re find for less demanding uses (like still photos or as backup card).
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