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nick99nack

I bought hard drives yesterday. Five 16 TB HDDs. Refurbs, not new. In 2024, 3 of them cost me $464.97. Today, five of them cost me $1,500. What previously cost $154.99 each is now $308.14. And, that's on the cheap end. Brand new ones on Amazon cost $359, and more in other places, if you can even find them. Also, as of a week ago you could order 3 at a time on Amazon. That went down to 2, and it's now down to one. In 5 days. Western Digital has already sold their entire stock for the rest of 2026, and into 2027.

That's only the latest piece of hardware to succumb to price hikes as AI companies are buying everything up.

I ordered some used, bulk RAM for my desktop in 2023. It was $120 for 10 16GB sticks of PC4-2666V ECC. Here's how the prices have changed since then:

Notice too that not only has the price increased over 550% from its starting point, but it was sold out in both January and February of this year. At the same time, the number of units sold increased between those two dates. So it's not that they're just out of stock - it's that they are selling as fast as they get them, at those inflated prices.

It's insanity, and it's only going to get worse for a while. Hopefully this AI bubble crashes and we are eventually rewarded with loads of cheap parts. One can dream, anyway...
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zookajoe · Posted: Fri Feb 20, 2026 4:26 am Post subject:

Yeah this shit is ass.

I had a kit of 128GB DDR5-6000 in my Newegg cart not too long ago in preparation for my next gaming PC build. $679.99 is what the kit would've cost, which while that's a lot of money for RAM, that's literally 2x64GB sticks.

That same kit now is $1679.99.

I ain't buying shit.
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LyraNovaHeart · Posted: Fri Feb 20, 2026 5:29 pm Post subject:

Memory got hit quite hard too. My Gemini 16 has 64GB of Corsair RAM, 5600MT/s. Back in Feb 2025 this was the price (snapshot from wayback machine):

Now in Feb 2026, it is over $631 more:

What the fuck
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sunnyp4rk · Posted: Fri Feb 20, 2026 10:38 pm Post subject:

It's a shame, because I really wanted to build my own PC of my creation at some point, but I don't think it'll be any time soon thanks to all this price gouging bullshit.

CsokibacsiHUN · Posted: Sun Feb 22, 2026 12:20 pm Post subject:

Thank God I upgraded in 2 yrs ago...

But to be honest the good side of this is that old tech might get more relevant.

I wouldn't say I predicted this but as newer and newer AI were introduced people could have realized it won't lead to good end in the long term.

Without any restrictions it doesn't just increase hardware prices but consumes more energy and produces immense heat that isn't good for the environment either... Crying or Very sad

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epicness · **CrossTalk Staff** Joined: 16 Aug 2025 Posts: 11

Yep.

In July, barely 6 months ago, I was eyeing a server with dual Xeon Gold 6240s and 512GB of DDR4 on eBay for something like $600. I literally had the damn thing in my cart.

Now, an equivalent server is something close to $5,000. Oh, how I'm wishing I didn't chicken out now lmao
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cadrega · Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2026 2:40 pm Post subject:

Time to hop on the complain train. Here's my story:

In 2024, I bought a brand new ThinkPad E16 Gen 2. Ryzen 7, completely spec'd out... except for the RAM. I figured I could upgrade from 16 to 32GB later, since I was strapped for cash and might not have even ended up needing that much. Around April, I added a $70 kit of basic ass Crucial 2x16GB DDR5 SODIMMs to my Amazon cart. I almost bought it, but thought better of it and waited longer. Come October, I finally decided it was time to buy it, but noticed it was >$100. I was just beginning to become aware of the rising prices, and the freakout was just beginning to start, so I figured I would wait it out a week or two and see if this was just stupid internet hype.

I checked again 2-3 weeks later, and it was $160. It's been about 4 months since then...

In summary, the most basic laptop DDR5 RAM has gone from $70 to $333 in a period of 6 months. We are living in a horrible timeline