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Forums - Gaming - Expansion Storage Prices Are Out of Control

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Pemalite on 17 January 2026

I did give the forum a heads up about a year ago before the prices rises started to occur.

Things are still going to get worst before they get better, 2026 is not going to be consumer friendly as far as consumer electronic prices are concerned.

Zkuq said:

It would probably be a great start to start deduplicating data. I think it was done with mechanical disks to speed up read speeds, but I think (?) it's not needed with SSDs (either as much or at all). I'm not sure how common it is in the industry, but I think recently Helldivers 2 deduplicated data on PC and reduced the space requirements by a whopping 85%. If that's any indication of what developers are even somewhat commonly doing, it's utter madness out there.

It was only done on optical disks, mechanical hard disks didn't "duplicate data" to strategically position chunks of data for performance reasons.
Game developers don't control where data gets placed on a mechanical hard drive anyway, it's the Operating System that manages that through the file system... And not all file systems are competent at managing data placement, thus requiring de-fragmentation of mechanical drives on a semi-regular basis.

Zippy6 said:

Yeah I'm not sure I'll ever need an SD Express. I'm going full physical where I can and even if I do get large third party titles that are keycards (EG. Star Wars Outlaws) I'm not going to have more than a couple installed.

Currently the 256GB SD Express is holding at it's launch price of £44.99 anyway.

I am only buying Physical carts (Not Game Key Cards) for Switch/Switch 2, so internal storage won't be an issue.

On Xbox Series X I have 16 Terabyte Drives (Thanks Xbox with your stupid limit, I wanted 24TB) and on PS5 I have a pair of 8TB drives (Sony is worst on their stupid limits) which is used for storage of game installs, then I transfer the games I want to play to internal storage on a per needs basis.
On PC I have 4x 20TB drives in RAID, it's faster in sequential than SATA SSD's, although SSD's still win in IOPS.

Only takes a couple minutes for a 100GB title to transfer on console, so much faster than Optical drive installation or Internet download.




www.youtube.com/@Pemalite

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JRPGfan on 17 January 2026
Signalstar said:

Holy crap what a terrible timeline we live in.

Everyone knows that prices for components have been increasing thanks to tariffs and AI demand but this is ridiculous.

I have been tracking expanded storage options for my Switch and PS5 over the last year or so. A 1 TB card for the Switch used to run about $99, now I'm seeing $160 minimum.

A 2TB SSD with built in heatsink compatible with the PS5 was as low as $180 a few months ago and I thought that was steep. Today the lowest I'm seeing is $330.

My Switch issue is not so pressing but I would still like to upgrade my memory card, even before I eventually buy a Switch 2.

The PS5 situation however is ridiculous. You get less than 700GB of usable storage on the standard launch model. I am tired of constantly deleting and redownloading just a handful of games. Especially when certain games like COD just take up way more space than is reasonable.

This is actually one of the reasons I like the streaming options that come with PS Plus Premium. I can just stream certain games without having to worry about space on my drive. Well my subscription just ran out and I renewed only at the Essential level, which does not offer streaming.

I'm torn between biting the bullet in fear that prices may continue to rise or just holding out for things to normalize. 

Either way, I feel we consumers are screwed. 

On newegg they have something like this:

https://www.newegg.com/team-group-2tb-t-force-cardea-a440-nvme-1-4/p/N82E16820331727?Item=N82E16820331727

It's 210$ for 2TB and PS5 compatible with a heatsink on. 

Still it's not cheap.



xl-klaudkil on 17 January 2026

Hmmm a bought a 2 tb ssd samsung pro for 170 euros last months



 

My youtube gaming page.

http://www.youtube.com/user/klaudkil

Zkuq on 18 January 2026
Pemalite said:
Zkuq said:

It would probably be a great start to start deduplicating data. I think it was done with mechanical disks to speed up read speeds, but I think (?) it's not needed with SSDs (either as much or at all). I'm not sure how common it is in the industry, but I think recently Helldivers 2 deduplicated data on PC and reduced the space requirements by a whopping 85%. If that's any indication of what developers are even somewhat commonly doing, it's utter madness out there.

It was only done on optical disks, mechanical hard disks didn't "duplicate data" to strategically position chunks of data for performance reasons.
Game developers don't control where data gets placed on a mechanical hard drive anyway, it's the Operating System that manages that through the file system... And not all file systems are competent at managing data placement, thus requiring de-fragmentation of mechanical drives on a semi-regular basis.

Really? Do games duplicate data because of optical media despite probably everything getting installed on mass storage anyway since like ten years ago...? I thought it had something to do with seek times, which, as far as I know, is an issue with HDDs as well.

Actually a quick search online reinforces my understanding, but I didn't look into it that deeply.



BonfiresDown on 18 January 2026

Do you actually play more than 700 GB worth of games on the regular? I’m curious what games those are.

I don’t have any deep knowledge on the subject but everything I’ve read indicates that we will live with higher prices on memory and storage for at least two years.

Last edited by BonfiresDown - on 18 January 2026

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konnichiwa on 18 January 2026
BonfiresDown said:

Do you actually play more than 700 GB worth of games on the regular? I’m just curious what games those are.

I don’t have any deep knowledge on the subject but everything I’ve read indicates that we will live with higher prices on memory and storage for at least two years.

The combo GTA VI(COD , BF or any shooter)/Fortnite will eat already a ton of storage and people tend to not delete games that have a ton of updates...






Zippy6 on 18 January 2026
Zkuq said:
Pemalite said:

It was only done on optical disks, mechanical hard disks didn't "duplicate data" to strategically position chunks of data for performance reasons.
Game developers don't control where data gets placed on a mechanical hard drive anyway, it's the Operating System that manages that through the file system... And not all file systems are competent at managing data placement, thus requiring de-fragmentation of mechanical drives on a semi-regular basis.

Really? Do games duplicate data because of optical media despite probably everything getting installed on mass storage anyway since like ten years ago...? I thought it had something to do with seek times, which, as far as I know, is an issue with HDDs as well.

Actually a quick search online reinforces my understanding, but I didn't look into it that deeply.

Asset duplication was absolutely a thing on HDDs, hell it's likely still done on some games now as it's just how developers have structured their files for ages, but it was more a necessity on HDDs for streaming assets.

Mark Cerny talked about it before.

"Without duplication, drive performance drops through the floor - a target 50MB/s to 100MB/s of data throughput collapsed to just 8MB/s in one game example Cerny looked at. Duplication massively increases throughput, but of course, it also means a lot of wasted space on the drive."

https://www.digitalfoundry.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-playstation-5-the-mark-cerny-tech-deep-dive

Spiderman for example stores all the assets needed for a city block together, so when that block is loaded as you move through the city all the data is together on the drive to be read fast. Which lead to them at one point having a trash bag asset duplicated over 600 times and taking up a gig of data before they kept it stored in RAM instead.

A lot of games will have big chunk files for levels that contain all the assets for that level, even if the asset has appeared in another level previously.



Chrkeller on 18 January 2026

Not storage related, but I looked at my PC budget. Two years ago I paid $130 for my ram. That exact ram today via Newegg is $470.



“Consoles are great… if you like paying extra for features PCs had in 2005.”
SvennoJ on 18 January 2026

I'm glad I bought a PS5 Pro when it came out, the 2TB inside is very nice, especially since I play in VR all the time. I have about 95 games installed on it. The largest is GT7 at 130 GB, yet average size of PSVR2 games is 10-15 GB. I never takes long to re download those anyway but the game library has no option to filter out ps+ games (can only filter on them, not remove them doh) so it's easier to keep my backlog and games I might revisit some day installed :/

It would be nice if the game library gets a lot more options. Let you mark and sort on favorites, sort on unplayed / play time, categories, VR games. At the minimum all the options you have in the store to browse games. With digital libraries getting ever bigger it's stupid to lump them all together.

My 'purchased' list is at 680: 205 PS5, 475 PS4, 348 PS+ (80 PS5, 268 PS4). That's all the options there are currently. No clue how many games I actually purchased, 332 left substracting PS+, but it counts both PS4 and PS5 editions, no idea what the overlap is.

So much easier to sort and keep track of my physical games!



crissindahouse on 18 January 2026

Yeah it's crazy, really happy that I have 2gb download speeds so that deleting and installing something doesn't really annoy me anymore. I'm just kinda angry that I didn't upgrade my PC with a better gpu already.