Your backup drive now costs the same as a laptop

Three months ago a 4 TB SanDisk SSD slipped below $500 on Apple’s web store. Today the same slab of flash is gone and the closest replacement lists at $1,199—if you can find it. The sticker shock is not a glitch; it is the first gust of a silicon storm that is ripping through every layer of personal storage.

The chip famine no one saw coming

AI datacentres are gulping NAND and DRAM by the petabyte, leaving the supply chain that once fed laptops, phones and external drives gasping. Contract prices for 3D NAND have doubled since January; spot prices are trading like crude oil. Apple, which famously pre-buys entire production runs, still has bare shelves. Walk into an Apple Store and the external-drive bay looks like a Moscow butcher in 1989: purple “unavailable” tags where $120 1 TB drives used to live, now marked $360 when they flicker back into stock.

Creative pros feel it first. A wedding videographer who backs up 200 GB per job just watched her annual storage budget explode from $600 to $1,800. Indie game studios that once passed around palm-sized SSDs for nightly builds are now chaining dusty spinning drives, praying the platters survive another spin. The cloud is no escape: AWS quietly raised EBS volume prices 15 % in March and Dropbox capped its new “unlimited” plans.

Smaller brands are resorting to lotteries. LaCie sent loyal customers an email raffle for 2 TB Rugged drives; winners pay February prices, losers wait six weeks. Samsung’s flagship T9 is “inbound” at Best Buy, but employees whisper the shipment is already earmarked for enterprise. Even obscure AliExpress sellers are scalping 1 TB microSD cards at triple MSRP.

Apple will not admit rationing, yet the math is brutal. Every MacBook Pro ships with soldered storage; when NAND quotes spiked 70 %, Apple hiked SSD upgrade prices $200 across the board. The same squeeze now ripples outward to the USB-C bricks stacked on desks. Gurman’s sources say the company has paused refreshes of the Mac Studio and Mac Pro until memory costs “normalize”—a euphemism for “no one knows when”.

The timing is exquisite cruelty. iPhone 16 Pro will shoot 4K120 ProRes this autumn, a format that devours 6 GB per minute. Creators who cheered the spec are now calculating terabytes like calories. One Los Angeles colorist told me he is negotiating a line item in client contracts titled “storage surcharge,” the digital equivalent of a fuel levy.

There are work-arounds, but they taste like ash. Archival Blu-ray is back from the dead; Japanese vendors sold 25 GB discs for ¥90 last month, up 40 %. Linear tape drives—relics that hum like refrigerators—are trending on Reddit’s homelab forum. The most honest advice circulating in Slack channels: buy two smaller drives now, before the 500 GB units vanish too.

The industry playbook is depressingly familiar. Micron and SK Hynix swear new fabs open in 2026; until then they will ship AI-grade silicon first and let consumer scraps fight for leftovers. Analysts who once predicted a glut by Christmas now whisper 2025. Translation: if your project folder is bulging, the next terabyte will cost blood.

So we delete, compress, and trust the cloud a little longer, knowing the bill will come due elsewhere. The terabyte, once a commodity, is now a luxury good—priced like jewellery and rationed like insulin. And the only thing growing faster than AI models is the stack of invoices on every editor’s desk.