The truce cools: RAM prices stop softening, while SSDs and hard drives rise noticeably again

After a few weeks in which a small window for optimism seemed to open, the latest data from the German market returns a much less friendly feeling. The correction seen between February and March is not consolidated and April reminds us that memory prices aren’t really relaxing. In the best of cases, some categories stabilize at still exorbitant levels. At worst, others rise strongly again.

The most followed reference continues to be DDR5, because it is the one that best reflects the impact of the crisis on current desktop computers. Here the index goes from 408% to 410% compared to the July 2025 base (it is the reference used by the source for all calculations), a minimal variation that, even so, has quite a bit of depth. We are not facing a sustained decline, but rather a plateau at exceptionally high altitudes. The market has stopped correcting and is stuck at a level that is still very far from any normality.

That idea fits quite well with what we had already seen when the slight relaxation in RAM prices made us wonder if we were facing a real trend or just a mirage. Two months later, the answer seems closer to the latter. There was a pause, yes, but April shows a market that does not give way and continues to operate with price pressure much higher than usual.

DDR5 stagnates at the top and DDR4 confirms that the problem is not only with new platforms

If we widen the focus, the photograph becomes even more eloquent. DDR3 and DDR4 continue to rise and reach an index of 342% compared to summer 2025. There are no big headlines here, because the increase in April is moderate, but precisely for that reason it is interesting. Apparently, the explosion phase may be behind us, but the increase in prices continues to advance little by little. And when this trickle continues for several months, the accumulated result is still very worrying.

In SODIMM, the usual format in laptops, the monthly variation is practically zero. The index remains at 352%, with a slight decline of 0.1% that in practice does not change anything. That is to say, there is no real relief here either. The general feeling is that the market has stopped moving with the shocks of the end of 2025, but not because it has normalized, but because has become accustomed to tremendous inflation to which we are faced in the components sector.

This scenario also fits the warnings about a RAM crisis that could last until 2030. Obviously, what is evident is that the reason continues to be the demand linked to artificial intelligence and data centers, which continues to strain the market, while production capacity does not seem capable of growing at the same rate. With that combination, any small one-off decline looks more like a technical correction than the beginning of a sustained decline.

The big surprise of April is in SSD and HDD, where the pressure accelerates again

The most relevant news, in any case, is no longer just in RAM. The real twist comes in the storage. Internal SSDs go up a 8.2% in a single month and reach a rate of 210%, which is equivalent to an average doubling compared to the pre-crisis level. It is not an anecdotal jump, but a sign that price tension continues to spread through the market and that relief does not even reach products where until recently there was still a little more margin.

Even more striking is the case of internal hard drives. Here the monthly increase is 15.1% and the index climbs to 184%. In other words, April makes it clear that HDDs are also beginning to feel the blow in a much more visible way. That changes the general reading of the moment quite a bit, because we are no longer just talking about building a new PC with expensive RAM, but also about upgrade storage capacity at an increasingly higher cost.

Curiously, external drives continue to hold up better. Its index stands at 124%, well below that of internal HDDs, which maintains striking anomalies in some high capacities. It is a difference that is difficult to sustain for a long time if the tension in storage continues, so it can also be read as a category that has not yet fully absorbed the pressure that is seen in other segments.

The only slightly more favorable note is once again in the graphs. Its index fell from 116% to 114%, with a monthly decline of 1.9%. It is not a spectacular fall, but it does serve as a contrast. It seems that while memory and storage remain expensive or become more expensive again, GPUs are moving in a somewhat more benign direction. In any case, what is clear to us is that there is no truce and that prices remain stuck at very high levels.