Historic and current memory and storage prices, collected in the spirit of John C. McCallum's classic memory-price dataset — interactive, with the raw data downloadable. Hover for details, click the legend to toggle series, drag or use the slider to zoom, and use the camera icon to export an image.
Price per gigabyte over time
Historical lowest $/GB on a log scale — one line per memory type:
DRAM, NAND flash, HBM, and hard disks.
Toggle nominal vs inflation-adjusted dollars (constant 2024 $, US CPI-U).
DRAM price by generation
The DRAM line above, broken out by generation across the full history —
Pre-DDR (SDRAM/core), DDR, DDR2, DDR3, DDR4, DDR5. (Generation is inferred from product
descriptions, so older points are approximate.)
Accelerator cost breakdown
Modeled estimates from Epoch AI: quarterly accelerator cost across the four
largest AI-accelerator designers — Nvidia, AMD, Google (TPU) and Amazon (Trainium)
— stacked by component (HBM, logic die, packaging/CoWoS, auxiliary), a
production-volume-weighted average.
HBM price by generation
By HBM generation (HBM2e → HBM3 → HBM3e → HBM4). HBM is sold only to accelerator
makers on confidential contracts — there is no public spot market — so these are
sparse industry-analyst estimates (TrendForce / SemiAnalysis), not transaction
prices. HBM4 is projected (launches Q3 2026). $/TBps is cost per unit of memory bandwidth
(stack price ÷ per-stack bandwidth).
Methodology, sources and caveats
Sources and method
| Category | What we track | Source and method | Reliability |
|---|---|---|---|
| DRAM $/GB | cheapest retail $/GB, overall and by generation (DDR3/DDR4/DDR5) | Deep history (1957–2024): the McCallum memory-price dataset (jcmit.net, via the Internet Archive). Mid-2024 onward: the cheapest new consumer DIMM each month from Keepa (Amazon retail price history), refreshed monthly. | Reference + live |
| NAND $/GB | cheapest retail SSD $/GB, 2010–present | 2016 onward: the cheapest consumer NVMe SSD each month from Keepa (Amazon retail price history), refreshed monthly; SATA and enterprise/datacenter drives are excluded, and per-drive posting glitches are filtered (see caveats). 2010–2016: four approximate pre-NVMe anchor points (no McCallum-equivalent flash dataset exists). | Live + approximate |
| Hard disk $/GB | cheapest new consumer hard drive $/GB, 1956–present | 1956–2024: the McCallum disk-price dataset (jcmit.net, via the Internet Archive; floppy entries and one RAID-array system, priced 4–6× above single drives of the same months, excluded). After mid-2024: the cheapest new consumer drive sold by Amazon itself each month, from Keepa — Seagate BarraCuda/IronWolf/SkyHawk, WD Blue/Red/Purple and Toshiba P300/N300/X300 only. Renewed, recertified, refurbished, used and server-pull listings, enterprise drives, relabelled ex-enterprise drives and multi-packs are excluded (see caveats). | Reference + live |
| HBM spend and cost breakdown | quarterly HBM spend ($B) and each component's share (%) of the accelerator bill of materials (HBM, logic, packaging, auxiliary) | Epoch AI (CC-BY): a modeled estimate, production-volume-weighted across the four largest accelerator designers (Nvidia, AMD, Google, Amazon); aggregate only, no per-company split. | External estimate |
| HBM $/GB by generation | HBM price per GB and per TB/s of bandwidth, by generation | Industry-analyst estimates — TrendForce and SemiAnalysis (HBM has no public spot market); bandwidth from JEDEC/Rambus. Observed periods only; no forward projections. | Sparse estimate |
Caveats
- $/GB defaults to the cheapest retail price in nominal USD (not contract or average; retail lags contract). Use the Real USD toggle for inflation-adjusted values — constant 2024 dollars via US CPI-U annual averages (BLS).
- The cheapest listing often tracks an end-of-life generation being cleared out, not the leading edge — the per-generation chart shows this.
- These are cheapest listed prices over time (via Keepa), not confirmed sales. For the SSD data, obvious posting errors are removed — any month a drive is listed more than 60% below its own typical price (e.g. a $130 SSD shown at $4) is dropped.
- The DRAM line splices two sources at mid-2024 (McCallum → Keepa); a small step there is expected, since Amazon's cheapest clearance can sit below McCallum's representative low.
- Amazon's hard-drive category is dominated by renewed/recertified and relabelled ex-enterprise drives (about 95% of a plain search), which would otherwise set the "cheapest" price at roughly half the new price. The hard-disk line therefore tracks new consumer drives only, and only Amazon's own price: third-party "new" offers for the same drive often run 30–40% lower, consistent with recertified stock relisted as new. This matches McCallum buying new desktop drives from a retailer (NewEgg).
- HBM figures are modeled estimates (cost share and spend), not measured prices.
Updates
DRAM, NAND and hard-disk $/GB refresh monthly from Keepa; HBM updates quarterly (Epoch AI). The McCallum backbone and HBM estimates are fixed. The downloadable CSV lists every point with its source.
Columns in the CSV
The first ten columns are unchanged; new columns are only ever added at the end, so spreadsheets that read columns by position keep working.
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
date | First day of the period. A Keepa (Amazon) row is the whole calendar month, published only after the month has ended. |
category, series, metric, unit |
What the value measures, e.g. DRAM / DDR4 (Keepa) / usd_per_gb. |
value | The measurement in unit (nominal USD). |
source, n_samples | Where it came from; for Keepa, how many listings were priced that month (the value is the cheapest of them). |
representative, notes | The listing or item behind the value, and how the point was derived. |
capacity_gb | Capacity of that item in GB as marketed (a 16 GB DIMM is 16, a 2 TB SSD or hard disk is 2000). McCallum rows use his own Size column; Keepa rows use the capacity the $/GB was computed from. Blank for estimates and aggregates. For Keepa this is the capacity of the cheapest-per-GB listing, so it is not a capacity trend. |
unit_price_usd | Price of that item, nominal USD (McCallum's Cost column; for Keepa, capacity × $/GB). |
generation | DRAM generation (DDR5, DDR4, DDR3, DDR2, DDR, SDRAM, EDO, or
SIMM for 30/72-pin modules whose DRAM type isn't stated); for SSDs, the PCIe generation
(PCIe Gen3, PCIe Gen4, …); for hard disks, the interface (RLL,
SCSI, IDE, SATA-1/-2/-3); or HBM generation. For Keepa DRAM it is the
search basket the listing came from. An SSD's PCIe generation and a hard drive's interface are taken only from what the seller
states (title or listing bullet points) and is never inferred from speed, so a few SSD rows are
blank. Also blank before ~1990 (boards, core memory, chips) and for aggregates. |
McCallum's memory $/MB uses binary megabytes, and those historical rows were converted at
×1000, so for McCallum DRAM rows unit_price_usd ÷ capacity_gb runs about 2.4% above
value. His disk table uses decimal megabytes, so hard-disk rows have no such offset.
About
Compiled and maintained by David Shim, Stanford DAM project. Questions or corrections: hsshim@stanford.edu.