A 30TB TLC enterprise SSD now costs $22,600, 6.5 times higher than the $3,460 it fetched around this time last year, and an equivalent hard drive costs $1,216, putting flash at 18.6 times the price of disk per terabyte. On those numbers, a 25PB AI storage build comes to $51.60 million all-flash against $12.86 million as a hybrid SSD-plus-HDD system. The figures come from the August update to VDURA's Flash Volatility Index, published by a vendor that sells exactly that kind of hybrid system, and they record a further 5% flash price rise in July with the TLC-to-HDD multiple easing from a 23.2 times peak in Q1.

The hybrid option only works if you can buy the hard drives, though, and Seagate and Western Digital have both told investors their nearline HDD output is sold out through 2027. Anyone without a long-term supply contract is paying spot prices for the disk, not the $1,216 in VDURA's table.

TrendForce’s Q3 survey has NAND contract prices rising 10–15% quarter on quarter, after 70-75% in Q2 and a 55–60% Q1 that saw enterprise SSD contract prices climb roughly 80% in a single quarter. VDURA's 5% figure sits inside that decelerating range, but the company reads it differently: Erik Salo, senior vice president of marketing and business operations, said in the release that "elevated flash pricing is structural."

The June update to the same index had already raised VDURA's Q1 2026 TLC figure from the $10,950 published in January to $17,500, so the company has already changed its own historical numbers once since the index launched.

VDURA also has the 30TB HDD rising from $495 in Q3 2025 to $1,216 now, a 2.5 times increase. Western Digital CEO Irving Tan told analysts in February that the company was sold out for 2026, with firm purchase orders from its top seven customers and agreements with three of its top five running into 2027 and 2028.

Seagate CEO Dave Mosley said on the company's April earnings call that nearline capacity was almost fully allocated through calendar 2027 under build-to-order contracts. Rosenblatt Securities analyst Sajal Dogra put the HDD spot premium at 30% to 40% in an August note ahead of WD's results. VDURA's mixed-fleet configuration pairs 5.78PB of flash with 22.68PB of hard drives, or roughly 756 30TB units at index pricing. A neocloud without a hyperscaler-scale supply agreement is buying those drives at spot, if at all, which moves the $12.86 million figure in only one direction: up

VDURA launched the index in January alongside a Storage Economics Optimizer Tool that models cost for the mixed-fleet architecture it sells. The broad direction matches independent data and our own retail tracking, which shows consumer SSD prices up as much as 220% over the same period. The 18.6 times multiple itself, though, sets one vendor's unexplained flash price sample against a hard drive price that neither Seagate nor WD is offering to new customers

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Luke James is a freelance writer and journalist. Although his background is in legal, he has a personal interest in all things tech, especially hardware and microelectronics, and anything regulatory.