Sandisk Has A New Plan To Save Budget Consumers From Soaring Memory Prices

Hard drive prices are rising as demand grows. Back in January, Tom's Hardware reported, per ComputerBase, prices had risen 46%, nearly tripling, over the four months prior. While they've come down a little since, SSDs are still expensive. The popular storage provider Sandisk has a plan to help. Soon, it will launch two SATA drives, the Sandisk 320 and Sandisk 520, with the express goal of making storage more accessible than M.2 NVMe solid-state drives. However, the new Sandisk SATA drives will sacrifice a bit of performance for price and availability, since they use older technology. 

If you didn't already know, there are four major types of hard drives, including SATA and NVMe. SATA is used in both physical hard drives and modern solid-state drives. SATA SSDs use a Serial ATA bus connection, which is limited compared to the NVMe format. SATA SSDs can achieve 550 MB/s write speeds, which are 10 to 15 times faster than conventional drives. NVMe uses the PCIe bus, and PCIe 5.0 — the current version — can achieve theoretical speeds of up to 64,000 MB/s over 32 lanes. It's much, much faster.

Sandisk's new drives will be an alternative to NVMe. Sandisk 320 capacities start at 250GB and go up to 2TB, while the Sandisk 520 starts at 500GB and goes up to 4TB. Sandisk has yet to announce prices, but given the promise to make them accessible, they should be close to market value. You can currently find a $250GB SATA SSD for about $50. A Dutch retailer has purportedly listed the launch date for the new drives as the beginning of June, but nothing has been officially confirmed.

Given the high prices of NVMe SSDs and their limited availability, spurred by growing demand from AI and data centers, there are fewer opportunities for consumers to upgrade storage or simply replace failing drives. According to Tom's Hardware, which is keeping track of SSD prices, drives that were once less than $200 are now priced way higher, sometimes quadrupling in price. Never mind adding more storage for photos or games; imagine dealing with a failing OS drive?

Sandisk's new SATA drives, the 320 and 520 series, should provide some relief if they are priced reasonably. Leaked Amazon listings indicate they'll be in a 2.5-inch form factor with a 7mm slim design, making them ideal for use in everything from desktops to ultra-thin laptops. The 320 is a good starting point for most, with sequential read speeds of up to 545 MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 525 MB/s. The 520 will be for pros, content creators, and those who need a bit more performance, with sequential read speeds of 560 MB/s and sequential write speeds of 525 MB/s/. There's no mention of the controller or NAND used inside the drives as of yet.

Essentially, this will provide a decent stand-in for extra storage in a pinch. If your drives fail, or you need to expand and don't mind sacrificing NVMe-level speeds, Sandisk's new options will do just fine. If you need something immediately, standard hard drives are still worth buying in 2026, especially for backup storage. Honestly, your old hard drives are valuable and would be worth using or selling if you have any lying around from old builds.