With the price of the latest DDR5 DRAM jumping by nearly five times in a year, a forecast says SSD supply shortages could also last until 2030.

On Aug. 17, local time, IT outlet TechRadar cited Wccftech as saying German retail market data showed DDR5 prices in mid-August rose to 486 percent of their level in July 2025.

The rise has recently accelerated. DDR5 prices climbed to 419 percent year on year in June and 445 percent in July, before surging to 486 percent in August. That is also a 16 percent increase in two months compared with mid-June. Prices dipped slightly early this year and then held steady, but returned to a steep rise from July.

Embedded SSD prices followed a similar pattern. In the German retail market, embedded SSD prices rose 7.7 percent in a month and are about 2.2 times higher than before the supply shortages. With prices of memory and storage devices, key PC components, rising at the same time, consumers are facing a growing cost burden.

The market is paying particular attention to the possibility that SSD price increases could be prolonged. Phua Kain Seng, CEO of SSD controller maker Phison, said expanding production capacity for NAND flash used in SSDs could take longer than expected. According to Taiwan Commercial Times, he recently discussed the time needed for expansion with a senior executive at a NAND manufacturer and was told it would take about 4 years, not the 2 years previously expected.

As a result, some are raising the possibility that the NAND supply shortage could last longer than the initially expected 2028, extending until 2030. That means SSD prices could also be affected by prolonged supply constraints.

A similar warning has emerged in the memory market. German PC hardware company 3Dcenter said, "If the current upward trend continues, prices could soon reach abnormal levels," and added, "For now, there are no signs of the rise easing." As price increases seen in major European markets align with other pessimistic forecasts, concerns are also growing that the supply crunch could become prolonged.

In this situation, a view is gaining ground that price pressure could intensify further for the remainder of this year and in 2027. Some also say system memory has already neared the limits of what consumers will accept. Still, because desktop and laptop sales continue, it is difficult for demand to fall sharply just because individual users delay upgrades.

Ultimately, the latest price surge shows that delayed supply expansion is emerging as a bigger factor than temporary retail fluctuations. If production normalization is pushed back for both memory and SSDs, the rally in PC component prices is increasingly likely to last longer than expected.