How Are Storage and System Costs Changing Amid the New Wave of Component Price Increases?

How Are Storage and System Costs Changing Amid the New Wave of Component Price Increases?

Q1: Why has a new wave of price increases emerged across the electronic components market?

Since the second half of 2025, the global electronic components and industrial automation sectors have seen a new round of concentrated price adjustments.

From memory devices and passive components to power semiconductors and critical industrial parts, multiple product categories have announced price increases within a short time frame, with most adjustments taking effect between late 2025 and the first quarter of 2026. This round of increases is characterized by broad coverage, relatively large magnitude, and strong persistence.

In the storage segment, major manufacturers such as Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron have raised prices for DRAM and NAND multiple times. In particular, enterprise-class high-capacity products have shown consecutive price adjustment signals at the channel level, including enterprise NVMe SSDs such as the Samsung PM1735 and Micron 9400 series.

At the same time, prices for passive components, power devices, analog ICs, and industrial connectors and control components have also moved upward, indicating that this is not a fluctuation limited to a single category, but a broader industry-wide trend.

Q2: What factors are driving this round of price increases?

This round of price adjustments is not driven by short-term sentiment, but rather by a combination of structural factors.

On the demand side, artificial intelligence and high-performance computing continue to fuel strong growth in server and storage demand. Server-class memory, especially DDR5 memory for data centers (such as the SK hynix H5CG48MEB series), has seen particularly strong demand. Meanwhile, the gradual recovery of automotive electronics and industrial automation markets has further increased demand for high-reliability components.

On the supply side, upstream raw material costs remain under pressure, and capacity for certain high-end products is still relatively tight. At the same time, leading manufacturers are using price adjustments to optimize product mix and profitability, supporting continued investment in next-generation technologies.

Q3: What does rising component pricing mean for systems and data centers?

For downstream users, the impact goes beyond higher prices for individual components. Instead, system-level cost structures are being re-evaluated.

In AI servers, industrial control systems, and communication equipment, core components such as DDR5 RDIMMs and enterprise-class NVMe SSDs typically account for a significant portion of the BOM. As prices for these key components rise in parallel, system architects are reassessing:

• Which data and functions truly require high-performance storage
• Which workloads can be optimized through architectural adjustments to balance cost and performance
• Whether long-term operating and expansion costs remain sustainable

As a result, more organizations are shifting from a “performance-first” mindset toward more refined and layered system design strategies.

Q4: Why is HDD being discussed again as storage prices continue to rise?

The renewed discussion around HDD is not driven by performance gains, but by its practical advantages in capacity and cost efficiency.

For cold and warm data, long-term storage of AI training datasets, data lakes, and archival use cases, HDDs remain widely deployed. Today’s data centers still rely heavily on 18TB–22TB enterprise-class HDDs (CMR / SMR architectures) to store large volumes of data with low access frequency.

As the cost of high-performance storage continues to rise, the idea that “not all data needs to reside on the fastest medium” has once again become both realistic and relevant.

Q5: What signal does Western Digital’s 40TB and 100TB HDD roadmap send?

Western Digital recently outlined its roadmap for next-generation high-capacity HDDs, including 40TB products and longer-term plans exceeding 100TB.

The significance of this roadmap lies less in the capacity numbers themselves and more in the underlying industry perspective it reflects: as data volumes continue to grow and storage costs remain under pressure, increasing per-drive capacity while improving energy efficiency and bandwidth remains a viable path toward economically scalable storage.

From this perspective, such roadmaps represent a long-term industry signal, rather than a short-term market move.

Q6: Does this mean HDD will replace SSD?

Not at all. Instead, it points to clearer functional separation.

SSDs will continue to serve workloads with strict requirements for performance, latency, and real-time response, while HDDs will maintain their role in capacity-driven, cost-sensitive, and long-term data storage scenarios. In AI and industrial systems, this layered approach is not a temporary compromise, but a design strategy better aligned with real-world cost constraints.

Summary

From widespread component price increases to renewed discussion around storage technology roadmaps, recent market developments are not isolated events. They reflect a broader shift toward more rational and structured system design. As cost pressures persist, how to achieve long-term balance through architectural choices and technology selection is becoming an increasingly important focus for the industry.