Reality Check: SSDs are a precious commodity now.
Not to sound like Chicken Little claiming the sky is falling, but it’s time for a reality check in the commercial photography world, specifically regarding storage media and job delivery. As you might already know, the massive boom in data center expansion and the AI arms race has effectively gobbled up the global supply of NAND flash . What does this mean for photographers and digi-techs? It means the cost of SSDs and RAM has already doubled (or quadrupled) in some instances. The supply of flash used to build our portable drives has been swallowed by massive commercial entities, leaving the "scraps" for consumer-level products for the next 1-2 years. This affects SD and CF Express cards as well! You’ve probably noticed that a 1TB Samsung T7 is now nearly twice what you paid for it three months ago. That price hike isn't likely to top out anytime soon. In the coming months, we’re looking at a market where these drives might not just be expensive, they might be unavailabl...
