Reality Check: SSDs are a precious commodity now.

Not to sound like Chicken Little claiming the sky is falling, but it’s time for a reality check in the commercial photography world, specifically regarding storage media and job delivery.

As you might already know, the massive boom in data center expansion and the AI arms race has effectively gobbled up the global supply of NAND flash. What does this mean for photographers and digi-techs? It means the cost of SSDs and RAM has already doubled (or quadrupled) in some instances. The supply of flash used to build our portable drives has been swallowed by massive commercial entities, leaving the "scraps" for consumer-level products for the next 1-2 years. This affects SD and CF Express cards as well!

You’ve probably noticed that a 1TB Samsung T7 is now nearly twice what you paid for it three months ago. That price hike isn't likely to top out anytime soon. In the coming months, we’re looking at a market where these drives might not just be expensive, they might be unavailable.

1TB Samsung T7 price over the past 6 months

The days of job delivery being a production afterthought need to be long behind us.

If you're a tech or even a photographer I'm sure you've been on a set where you ask the producer or client for a delivery drive (that you reminded them about days before) and you’re greeted with wide eyes and a hesitant, "Okay... we'll get one." Then a PA is dispatched to the local Best Buy to grab whatever is on the shelf. In this current climate, there’s a good chance that shelf will be empty, or at the very least, the price will be outrageous.

This shift is going to start impacting production budgets. The days of treating delivery drives as a last-minute $80 line item are over. Because of that, I want to encourage everyone (photographers, techs, producers, and agencies) to start talking about delivery/hand-off earlier in the pre-production process.

This might be a "Hot Take" but, If a client wants to keep the budget tight, tell them to look at the stack of drives sitting on their desk from past jobs. (Ideally, those jobs have already been offloaded to a redundant server anyway.) Rather than letting those drives collect dust and most likely suffer bit rot format it and bring it to set. We need to be viewing them as a reusable precious commodity rather than just sourcing new ones for every single hand-off. They should be for shuttling the data from A to B, not act as library of jobs to sit on a shelf.

(Just make sure they aren't showing up with one of these and it's a "modern" SSD)

I’ve personally stashed away a few new drives for the "rainy days" ahead. You can still find a few decent prices on some of lower performance SSDs (which are fine for job delivery) I wouldn't go so far as to fill your closet full since the crunch will end eventually. Just act accordingly.

We all need to get better at data management; if you have an afternoon free, take the time to sort through your stack of SSDs and see what can be wiped and repurposed or is properly archived. Maybe you can even make you a few bucks reselling them to a client. If you want some guidance in on consolidation maybe check this out: Conquering a mountain of hard drives: Making sense of NAS and DAS 
Or even reach out about how you can do better.

It's also worth mentioning that the cost of high density HDDs has also been affected by this crunch so if you have capacity in your NAS/DAS be thankful but also might be a good idea to look back over that archive and see if you need to keep everything... Might be time to let some of that data go. Or start shopping for a recertified drive.