What the NAND Shortage Actually Did to Gaming SSD Prices

Two numbers, one catalogue, ten weeks apart

Between 8 July and 16 September 2026, the cheapest price per terabyte across the Gen4 and Gen5 M.2 gaming SSDs we track moved from $67.50 to $109.75 - a 62.6% jump, if you just compare the two floors. That is a real number, computed from our own data, and it is also the wrong number to answer "how much more expensive did gaming SSDs get."

The reason is the same one this site's own price-index methodology exists to catch: the catalogue itself grew over that window, from 132 tracked listings to 168. A cheaper new listing appearing, or an existing one going out of stock and being replaced by a pricier one, moves the floor without a single seller actually raising a single price. Comparing two floors ten weeks apart measures the catalogue's composition as much as it measures inflation - the same trap this site's HDD, SSD and RAM price trackers all correct for elsewhere, and the one this article exists to correct for here specifically, for the gaming-SSD slice of the catalogue.

The matched-model number, which is the real one

We paired each of the 169 individual listings in our Gen4/Gen5 gaming SSD catalogue that had both an earliest and a latest recorded price in that window, computed the ratio of latest to earliest for each one individually, and took the geometric mean across all 169 pairs - the same matched-model method this site uses for its server RAM and hard drive price indices, because it answers the actual question: on average, did the price of a given listing you could have bought in July cost more or less by September.

The answer: +4.23%. Real, and not nothing - but a fraction of the 62.6% the naive floor comparison implied, and the difference between the two numbers is entirely the catalogue-growth effect described above. If you read one number out of this article, make it this one: gaming SSD prices, listing for listing, rose modestly over the summer - not by two-thirds.

Why any increase at all - the supply side, not our own reporting

We did not measure the cause, only the effect - the causal story below comes from named sources, not our own analysis, and we link rather than re-derive it. SanDisk has been reported raising prices by around 50%, which is not a promotional adjustment but a supplier resetting what its own output costs. QLC NAND - the density tier that made cheap high-capacity SSDs possible in the first place, and the tier most gaming SSD capacities beyond 1TB draw on - has been reported booked through 2026, meaning the buyers who needed that capacity had already committed to it before retail demand had a chance to bid for it.

Two forecasting sources disagree on the endpoint, and we are stating the disagreement rather than picking a side. Jefferies Equity Research, in coverage dated 29 June 2026, modeled storage price rises of 40-50% in Q3 2026 and 30-40% in Q4, expecting no meaningful relief until 2028. Against that, DigiTimes reported on 2 February 2026 that YMTC fast-tracked its Wuhan Phase III NAND fab into mass production roughly a year ahead of the timeline Jefferies' model assumed. TrendForce's own contract-price tracking shows a real deceleration already under way: NAND contract prices are forecast to rise 10-15% quarter-on-quarter in Q3 2026, against 70-75% in Q2 - still rising, but a much smaller rise. See our full, continuously updated SSD price forecast for the dated detail behind every figure in this paragraph.

What this means for a gaming build today

Two things follow from our own live pricing that are worth stating plainly. First, the generation question and the price question are separable: our own live same-money comparison shows a fixed budget buying meaningfully more capacity in Gen4 than in Gen5 at every tier we track today, a gap that predates this shortage and is not caused by it - see our Gen4-vs-Gen5 page for the cited testing behind why that gap matters less for gaming than the sticker price difference might suggest. Second, the modest +4.2% matched-model rise we measured is a summer-window snapshot, not a forecast - the supply-side sources cited above describe pressure that both predates and is expected to outlast this specific window, so treat this number as what happened, not a promise about what happens next.

Why we're publishing the naive number at all

It would have been simpler to report only the matched-model figure and leave the floor comparison out entirely. We're including both deliberately, because the 62.6% figure is exactly the kind of number that circulates when a comparison gets made casually - someone checks a price today, remembers roughly what it was a couple of months ago, and reports the gap between two floors without accounting for what else changed in between. That is not a bad-faith error; it is the natural way to compare two numbers when you only have two numbers. The correction is not "don't trust the 62.6%," it's "know which question each number actually answers." The floor comparison answers "how has the cheapest available price moved," which is a real and useful question for a buyer scanning today's listings. The matched-model comparison answers "how much more does the SSD I could have bought in July cost me in September," which is the question a reader asking about a shortage's effect on prices is actually asking. Neither number is wrong; only one of them is the answer to that specific question, and we'd rather show our work than print the more dramatic figure and let the reader assume it means something it doesn't.