Storage prices have gone completely crazy lately — the 4TB SSD I bought in September has instead become a financial product?

Preface

Hi everyone, I'm Xiyuan.

Last time I mentioned my hard drive had failed, and to recover the data I needed to make a full image of the old drive. An image that large of course wouldn't fit on my existing drives.

So I ordered without hesitation and bought a new Lexar 4TB SSD.

I have to say SSD prices are truly insane right now — it feels like when the Samsung factory caught fire back then.

I bought this SSD on September 20th for 1,500 yuan.

Then today (November 1st) I checked, and the price had already shot up to 1,700 😂. Completely crazy.

In just a little over a month, it went up nearly 15%. This SSD isn't a storage medium — it's a financial product.

Packaging

The outer packaging follows Lexar's usual style.

Back

The back has some specs and model information, and it supports the NVMe 1.4 protocol. Nothing particularly flashy overall — pretty standard.

Unboxing

After opening the box, it's the familiar plastic packaging, with the SSD itself and a manual inside.

The SSD Itself

The look still has a nice quality feel to it — black and gold color scheme, and Lexar's logo is printed quite finely.

Back of the SSD

The back shows the NAND and controller locations; the build quality looks solid.

SSD Info

Power-on count is only 2 — that's ridiculously new, basically fresh from the factory.

Partitioned It

After partitioning, the capacity shows as 3815 GB, which is the typical usable size for a 4TB drive.

Speed Test

This time I didn't install it directly in the computer's M.2 slot

but used it in an enclosure, so the speeds are just for reference.

Still pretty good, considering this enclosure only does 10Gbps.

Wrap-up

Overall, this Lexar 4TB SSD is pretty satisfying:

• Relatively friendly price (though it's gone back up now 😂)
• Solid build quality
• Stable speeds
• Low power-on count, almost brand new

From a practical standpoint, it's more than capable of large-capacity data storage and video footage backup.

But from an "investment" standpoint, this drive of mine has truly become a "financial product."

After all, getting to experience "buying a hard drive and making money" in the gadget community

is a kind of wonderful fun in its own right.