Prices rarely, if ever, go down in a meaningful degree.
In 2011, there was a large flood in Thailand that impacted ~40% of hard drive manufacturing. As a result, hard drives significantly increased in price. This was back when SSDs weren’t mainstream yet.
A year or two later, when manufacturing capacity was restored, prices were essentially back to what they were before the disruption.
Apart from disruptions like that, HDDs, SSDs, and RAM have always been going down in price.
tal@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
Prices on memory have virtually always gone down, and at a rapid pace.
ourworldindata.org/…/historical-cost-of-computer-…
1000009320
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
What you are describing is something different… that is “close enough” to Moore’s Law for all but the most pedantic.
The (I forget the proper economics term so) base price of RAM/Storage does indeed go down as new processes and economies of scale are developed. Its why a good rule of thumb was to always just spend roughly the same on storage during an upgrade and that would result in faster technologies and larger capacity drives and so forth.
That isn’t what is happening with RAM in 2025. A much better comparison is GPUs because… it is the same problem. It is ridiculously high demand from businesses (often startups) driving this. A quick search didn’t yield an easy graph and I can’t be bothered to go dig through Gamers Nexus’s twelve videos on it, but the price of an “entry level” GPU has drastically changed in the past decade.
But just for two-ish data points?
The last point being what is, by all accounts, going to be the new normal. Barring outside impacts like… RAM going through the roof. Vendors will sell the cards for the ACTUAL MSRP rather than the inflated demand prices. And they will still be considerably more expensive as a result.
All of which is to say… my current card is definitely good enough but having a hard time deciding if I do one “final” upgrade for the decade. But I am an AMD boi so those are at least “reasonable” in terms of price per performance.
eskuero@lemmy.fromshado.ws 3 weeks ago
people say go back in time to pick the correct lotto number
I say go back in time and sell my 8TB disk for 80 billion
Goodlucksil@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Well, no. Computers until recently (2000s or so) were incompatible with modern protocols required for that much memory.
eskuero@lemmy.fromshado.ws 2 weeks ago
Bring back my computer as well