ssdstoragebuying guide
How to Choose the Right SSD in 2026
UK SSD prices rose 9.6% between March and July 2026 on a matched basket of 300 drives. What that means for which drive you buy, and why 2TB now beats 1TB on value.
UK SSD prices rose 9.6% between March and July 2026 on a matched basket of 300 drives. What that means for which drive you buy, and why 2TB now beats 1TB on value.
Most SSD buying advice starts from an assumption that has quietly stopped being true: that storage gets cheaper while you wait. Our own price tracking says otherwise. Between March and July 2026, a matched basket of around 300 UK SSDs and NVMe drives rose 9.6% — and it rose in every single month.
That changes the advice, and it changes which drive you should buy. Here is what we measured.
We track prices for roughly 2,900 PC components on Amazon UK, recording an observation each time a price changes. That gives us 351,278 observations between 8 February and 18 July 2026.
Comparing the same drives month over month — not the average of whatever happened to be listed — gives this:
| Period | Drives compared | Change |
|---|---|---|
| March → April | 304 | +5.94% |
| April → May | 303 | +1.02% |
| May → June | 330 | +1.49% |
| June → July | 312 | +0.89% |
| Chained total | +9.6% |
Every month moved the same way. The sharpest jump was March into April, at nearly 6% in one month.
Storage was not alone, but it moved hardest. Over the same period and method, CPUs rose 4.2%, RAM 3.4%, GPUs 3.1% and motherboards 2.6%. Storage rose roughly three times faster than the rest of the market.
It is easy to measure this badly. Average the listed price of every SSD on sale in March, do the same in July, and you are not measuring price changes — you are measuring which products entered and left the catalogue. Retailers add and drop lines constantly, and a wave of new premium drives makes the market look more expensive when nothing has actually moved.
Measured that naive way, our own data suggests a 2.5% rise that peaked in May and eased afterwards. That figure is wrong. It reflects catalogue churn.
The matched-basket numbers above only ever compare a drive to itself. A drive counts towards a month only when we hold observations for it in both months. That removes composition entirely, and it tells a cleaner story: a steady, uninterrupted climb.
Price per terabyte falls as capacity rises, but not evenly. Across in-stock SSD and NVMe drives we track, comparing the cheapest price per terabyte in each tier against the tier below it:
| Capacity | Drives | vs previous tier |
|---|---|---|
| Under 500GB | 49 | — |
| 500GB | 36 | −25% |
| 1TB | 88 | −4.7% |
| 2TB | 84 | −33.9% |
| 4TB | 36 | −47.9% |
Current £/TB figures for every tier are on our storage price tracker — they move too often to print here without going stale.
The interesting part is the 1TB row. Stepping up from 500GB to 1TB improves your price per terabyte by less than 5% — you pay roughly double for roughly double the space. It is close to a wash.
Stepping from 1TB to 2TB is a different matter: a third cheaper per terabyte. From 2TB to 4TB, cheaper again by nearly half. In relative terms, 2TB gets you double the capacity of 1TB for only a small premium over double the price — nowhere near the jump from under-500GB to 500GB.
If you are choosing between 1TB and 2TB, 2TB is the better buy on nearly every measure. The 1TB tier is where the market is least generous, and it happens to be the tier most buying guides recommend by default.
We have too few 8TB-and-above drives in stock to publish a reliable figure for that tier — the handful we track are enterprise models priced well above the trend — so we have left it out rather than draw a line through five data points.
Waiting is currently costing money. On these numbers a £120 drive in March is a £131 drive in July. There is no guarantee the trend continues, but nothing in five months of data suggests storage is about to get cheaper on its own.
Buy the capacity you will want in two years. Conventional advice, but it carries more weight when prices are climbing and when the 2TB tier is this much better value per terabyte.
Treat older guides with suspicion. Anything written in 2025 is describing a cheaper market than the one you are buying in.
SATA SSDs use the same interface as traditional hard drives and top out around 550 MB/s. Fast enough for general use, a bottleneck for large transfers or heavy multitasking.
NVMe SSDs sit in an M.2 slot and talk over PCIe. A Gen 4 drive delivers around 7,000 MB/s sequential reads, roughly 12x SATA. Gen 5 pushes past 10,000 MB/s, though real-world gains over Gen 4 are marginal outside sustained large-file work.
For a boot drive or anything you actively work on, NVMe is the default in 2026.
For a boot drive or primary storage, stick with TLC. QLC suits bulk game libraries and media storage you write once and read often. The failure people actually notice with QLC is not reliability but a sharp drop in write speed once the drive's fast cache fills — copying a large library onto a QLC drive can slow dramatically part way through.
A DRAM cache holds the drive's mapping table in fast memory, keeping performance steady under sustained load. Budget drives omit it and borrow a slice of system RAM through Host Memory Buffer instead.
For a boot drive, prefer DRAM cache. For secondary storage, DRAM-less is fine and the saving is real. The difference shows up under sustained writes, not in benchmarks that finish in seconds.
We record a price observation for each tracked product whenever its listed price changes on Amazon UK, going back to February 2026. This article uses observations from 1 March onwards; February is excluded because we were still populating the catalogue and coverage is uneven.
Month-over-month figures are matched-basket: a drive contributes to a period only when we hold observations for it in both months, and each drive is compared only against itself. Monthly changes are chained to give the cumulative figure. Capacity tiers use current in-stock listings.
Two limitations worth stating. These are listed Amazon UK prices for the products we track, not a national retail index, and they do not capture discounting elsewhere. And the per-terabyte figures are the cheapest available in each tier rather than the average — averages here are pulled upwards by enterprise and premium drives most buyers are not shopping for.
For most UK builders in 2026, a 2TB Gen 4 NVMe TLC drive with DRAM cache is the sweet spot — not the 1TB drive most guides default to, which sits in the worst-value tier of the market right now.
On timing: storage has become more expensive every month since March, so there is no data-backed reason to wait for a better price, and a clear cost to buying less capacity than you will eventually want.
Check our storage price tracker for current prices across every drive we follow, including price history for individual products, or browse every component we track if you are pricing up a full build.
Compare prices and find deals on the products mentioned in this article.
This article was written with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor. Price data is sourced from Amazon UK. For more information, see our About page.