To my shame, as someone who, three years ago, was still telling friends "wait a little longer, prices are bound to fall," I now just want to slap myself twice every time I open any PC-building store.

The mechanical hard drive market has been climbing for seven consecutive quarters now.

In the July-to-September 2026 round, bulk transaction prices — the industry's bellwether — hit a new high again. Note the wording: "the sixth consecutive quarter setting a new record", not just an occasional blip.

Drilling down to specific models: the 3.5-inch 1TB drive, the most common in desktops and surveillance equipment, jumped 15% quarter-over-quarter to $66.7 per unit, roughly ¥449; the 2.5-inch 1TB version commonly used in laptops rose 10% quarter-over-quarter to about $61.2, roughly ¥412.

Data centers' appetite for SSDs has been blown wide open, sharply cutting off a big chunk of the flash memory capacity that would otherwise have flowed to consumer PCs. The price curve has gotten so steep that even "soaring" sounds conservative — by April to June this year, benchmark SSDs had climbed to 3.5 times their price a year earlier.

With SSDs priced outrageously, HDD makers naturally pivoted as well, tilting all their production lines and R&D resources toward high-capacity nearline drives for data centers while squeezing consumer lines again and again. Seagate was the most direct: it announced discontinuation of some low-capacity models outright.

What's worse, this market has pitifully few players. Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba — just three companies, and the trio holds about 80% of global capacity. Seagate CEO Dave Mosley put it plainly on the earnings call: nearline capacity is fully booked through the end of 2026, and many customers have already scheduled procurement plans into 2029 or even further out.

That means, for the next three years, you won't see any possibility of "capacity expansion bringing prices down."

If hard drive price hikes only made your wallet ache, then GPUs truly broke people's spirit.

German hardware outlet PCGH has been tracking local retail prices and found that no RTX 5090 quote under €5,200 remains anywhere. The cheapest tier right now is the Gigabyte RTX 5090 Gaming OC sold through third-party channels at €5,249, roughly ¥40,870.

At launch in Germany, this card's MSRP was just €2,099. Current prices are already more than 2.5 times the original, and it looks poised to head toward three times.

The funniest part is that Nvidia's official product page still lists a €2,099 MSRP — but that's only the Founders Edition price, and the FE is essentially unobtainable. If you actually click into the purchase links, the cheapest ASUS TUF RTX 5090 OC still costs €5,365.

The root cause is still memory. This card carries 32GB of GDDR7 VRAM, the largest memory capacity of any current consumer GPU. And VRAM itself is the epicenter of this round of price hikes.

Data centers take the finest capacity, enterprise customers take more than 95% of HDD shipments, and ordinary consumers are left with the scraps. In this structure, the retail market is always the last to be served.

So if you have idle high-capacity drives lying around, don't rush to sell them — they may be worth more than you think. If you're planning to build a PC, my advice is blunt: face reality, downgrade where you can, wait when you must, and don't fight the trend.

3DSTOR is a global IT component supplier that has been established for many years and has established long-term and stable cooperative relationships with top well-known brands such as Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Western Digital, and MSI. The main products include servers, motherboards, graphics cards, CPUs, hard drives, etc.We have long been focused on serving the global B2B market, providing a variety of AI/ML/HPC solutions, and can provide one-stop procurement services for IT hardware customers with different needs. We promise that our products are 100% brand new and original, and we will also conduct technical testing on the products before shipping.