If you’ve been putting off buying an external hard drive, the window to grab one at a sane price may have already closed. Apple has quietly updated the prices of external storage drives across its website and retail stores, and the increases are jarring. A SanDisk 4TB SSD that used to cost around $500 is now listed at $1,200. The 1TB version has gone from $120 to $360—a 200% jump.
Mark Gurman first flagged the changes in his Bloomberg Power On newsletter over the weekend, noting that vendors, not Apple, set these prices. But that’s cold comfort if you’re a video editor or photographer who needs terabytes of local backup on a deadline.
AI data centers are eating the world’s storage supply
The root cause isn’t mysterious. AI infrastructure buildouts—think OpenAI’s Stargate project and similar hyperscale data centres—have created an enormous appetite for DRAM and NAND flash. Semiconductor makers have responded by prioritising high-margin enterprise chips, leaving consumer SSDs in a supply squeeze. Mechanical hard drives are feeling it too: prices were already up 46% between September 2025 and January 2026, per Gizmodo’s reporting.
Apple already raised MacBook Air and MacBook Pro prices by $100 each earlier this month for the same reason. External drives are just the next domino.
Finding stock is now half the problem
Beyond pricing, availability has become its own headache. External SSDs on Apple’s website are virtually sold out. Customers who do find stock are mostly walking into physical Apple Stores—and paying the inflated prices there. Amazon and Best Buy tell a similar story: limited inventory, elevated costs, no clear floor in sight.
It’s probably only going to get worse through the rest of 2026. For now, unless you urgently need the capacity, cloud storage is your least painful option.
