What memory and storage cost for a PC build

What is in each basket

This is a fixed basket priced in dollars rather than a series rebased to 100, so each month's figure is a cost you can compare with a receipt. Nothing is weighted and nothing is rebased.

For each product, we take the median of its daily prices within the calendar month. For each component, we take the median of those product figures across every product in that exact specification that had a price that month. The basket total is the sum of the component medians. Completed months are never recomputed.

• Current build: a 32GB DDR5-6000 kit, a 1TB NVMe drive and a 2TB NVMe drive.
• DDR4 build: a 32GB DDR4-3200 kit and a 1TB NVMe drive.

The baskets are editorial choices, not survey results. 32GB of DDR5-6000 is the configuration current desktop builds and reviews most often settle on, and 32GB of DDR4-3200 was its equivalent in the previous generation. The storage is one 1TB drive for the system and a 2TB drive for games and files. The DDR4 basket carries one drive because the other storage specifications we track did not have enough products far enough back to keep the series starting in January 2023. Specifications are held fixed so that changes reflect prices, not shifting parts.

The series

Each point is the basket total for that month. The current month never appears, because a partial month moves under the reader for no reason other than how far through it you are. A month's figure is fixed once the month ends and is not revised afterwards.

What this figure is for

Use this figure for

tracking what the same fixed memory-and-storage basket costs at U.S. retail over time.

Do not use it for

the cost of a complete PC, the cheapest possible build, or the RAM and SSD market as a whole.

Prices represent

regular Amazon listing prices, not Lightning Deals, Prime-exclusive or Warehouse prices.

What this does not tell you

The series starts in January 2023, and that is a limit of the catalog rather than of the market. A basket can only begin when every one of its components has enough tracked products to give an honest median, which we set at five. The 1TB NVMe component is the binding one: it reaches five products in January 2023, later than any other component in either basket. There are earlier figures, but they sit above a gap rather than continuing a run, so they are not published.

Capacities are not pooled to buy more history. Merging 1TB and 2TB drives into one component would push both baskets back to March 2022. It is not done, because the component would stop being "a 1TB drive" and become "a drive", and the basket would no longer describe a build anyone would assemble.

The year-over-year figure swings hard, and it says as much about the month it is measured against as the month it is measured in. For the current build it has run from -20.1% in January 2024 to +231.4% in September 2026, measured across the published monthly series, moving by tens of points from one month to the next. The dollar figure is the durable claim here; the percentage is the volatile one, which is why it is published as a floor rather than a decimal.

These are regular Amazon listing prices, not deals. Lightning Deals, Prime-exclusive member prices and Warehouse prices are not in our data at all, so this says nothing about what any sale offered. Prices are the Amazon price, or the best marketplace price where Amazon has no offer of its own.

Every month

45 months per basket. Component columns are medians; the count beside each is how many products it was computed over. The same figures are in the monthly CSV, with notes on how to read it.

Small figures are product counts. Component medians are per month; the basket total is their sum.

How this relates to the Price Index

The Memory Price Index compares each product with itself over a period, which is the right way to ask how much prices moved. This page adds up what a fixed set of parts cost, which is the right way to ask what a build costs. A change computed between two rows here will not equal the Price Index for the same period, and the two answer different questions. The methodology page covers how prices are collected and what the data cannot say.

Figures through September 2026, computed from tracked price history. Page last regenerated: October 3, 2026.