Is Prime Day a good time to buy RAM? What ten years of prices show
We checked the everyday price of the 235 memory kits and SSDs we track against every Prime Day, October Prime sale, and Black Friday weekend since 2017. Three things held up. Prime Day is a slightly better time to buy than an ordinary week, by about 3 percentage points on a typical product and 6 to 9 points on NVMe SSDs. The October Prime event is not: across four years it was indistinguishable from any other week. And Black Friday is worth about 2 points in a normal year, but in 2025, with memory prices climbing, the Black Friday weekend was 13 points worse than an ordinary week. One limit up front: these figures are about the regular listed price. Lightning Deals and Prime-exclusive prices are not in our data, so this is not a verdict on the advertised deals, only on what the price you see the rest of the year does around a sale.
How we measured it
For each sale, we took every product that had an in-stock price during the sale window and in the 30 days before it, and compared the lowest price during the sale with the product's typical price over that previous month. That gives one number per product per sale: how far below its recent normal it dipped.
A dip on its own proves nothing, because prices also dip in ordinary weeks, and in some years they fell all year long. So we ran the same calculation on hundreds of ordinary windows of the same length, drawn from the same calendar year as each sale and kept clear of every sale period. The finding for each event is the gap between the two: how much further the price fell during the sale than during a normal week that year. Every figure below is that gap.
Prime Day: a small, repeatable edge
Across the nine Prime Days from 2017 to 2025, the typical tracked product bottomed about 3 percentage points further below its previous month's price than it did in an ordinary window of the same year. It beat the ordinary week in seven of the nine years. The two exceptions, 2018 and 2019, were both years when prices were falling anyway, so an ordinary week already came with a discount.
The clearest case is 2024. The typical product's lowest Prime Day price was 6.7 percent under its previous month; an ordinary two-day window that year managed zero.
NVMe SSDs are where the effect is strongest. In 2024 and 2025, the two years with enough drives to measure, they bottomed 6 to 9 points further below their recent price on Prime Day than in an ordinary window. DDR4, DDR5 and SATA drives all showed the edge, but smaller, in the 2 to 4 point range.
The October sale: no edge at all
The October event, called the Prime Early Access Sale in 2022 and Prime Big Deal Days since, has run four times. Measured the same way, it beat an ordinary window in two of the four years and lost in the other two, with a median gap under 1 point. On the regular price, the past four Octobers say the wait bought nothing.
Black Friday: a small edge in normal years, a trap in a rising one
Black Friday through Cyber Monday beat an ordinary same-year window in six of nine years, by a median of about 2 points. Then there is 2025. With memory prices rising through the shortage, the typical product's lowest Black Friday weekend price was 13 percent above its previous month, and 13 points worse than an ordinary week that year. The sale did not stop the climb, and shoppers who waited for it paid more than shoppers who bought in October.
That is the general lesson in the data: a sale window shaves a few points off wherever the price already is. When the price is rising a few points a week, the sale does not catch up with the wait.
Two things people assume that the data does not show
Prices are not raised before sales. Comparing each product's price six to eight weeks before a sale with the two weeks before it, across nearly a thousand product-and-sale pairs, the median change is zero and the price rose in 49 percent of cases, which is a coin flip. Where prices did rise into a sale, in 2025, they rose into every other week too.
No month owns the cheapest price of the year. Among products with a full year of readings, the annual low landed in November 16 percent of the time, July 10 percent, October 3 percent. With 31 product-years to count, none of those is distinguishable from chance.
What we cannot see
Our price history records the regular Amazon price, or the best marketplace price where Amazon has no offer of its own, which is the case for about three quarters of the products we track. It does not record Lightning Deals, Prime-exclusive member prices, or Warehouse prices. A four-hour deal that never touched the regular listing is invisible to us, which means these figures more likely understate a real sale effect than overstate it. Each sale day also usually contributes one reading per product, so a brief dip can be missed. And the early years are thin: 2017 and 2018 rest on a handful of products, while 2023 to 2025 carry most of the weight.
What this means for October 2026
Prime Big Deal Days runs October 6 and 7. The four previous October events did not move the regular price of memory or storage, and this year prices are rising. If you need RAM or an SSD now, the buying guides show where today's price sits against each product's own history. If a specific Lightning Deal appears on a product you want, judge it against that product's price chart, not against the sale banner. And if you are holding out for Black Friday, the last time prices were climbing like this, the holiday weekend was the most expensive window of the season.
Reviewed September 25, 2026 against the data on that date. The figures are fixed to that date and will not be silently updated; the piece will be reviewed after Prime Big Deal Days and again after Black Friday. Page last regenerated: October 3, 2026.