Disk & NVMe Storage Crisis
There is a crisis of supply for critical disk and NVMe storage devices in 2026. We are certain Digital Forensics departments have been witnessing the following two things over the last 6 months:
- Rising Disk &NVMe prices
- Scarcity of supply
This storm has been coming for a few years, but we believe it is going to get a lot worse. Materials availability (mostly NAND flash), Lack of Infrastructural planning, AI processing power thirst, and energy costs are the main reasons. NVMe are currently hit hardest, but also disks with platters are being affected. Reports are that the two largest manufacturers are sold out through mid-2027. This means that their distributors are being forced to ration the product, and prices are expected to continue to increase dramatically. We have already seen as much as 500% increases for NVMe’s in the last 6 months from some suppliers. We expect a short-term push to the cloud, but we do not believe its a good long term solution as that too will inevitably succumb to price increases, and if the data is anything other than for deep archive the egress fees will end up a lot worse. But what can be done about it?
You may know us for our history in Backup expertise and also for our converted Bank Vaults that archive preserved data for clients. We are getting around the problems internally by better utilization of existing server space, NAS and HDD’s. We are backing up to deep tape (LTO 9 is up to 45 TB per tape), vaulting, and creating file metadata searching with Invenire (Metadata Review platform). We have already implemented custom solutions for some eDiscovery partners. The result is the freeing up of disk/server space, and better utilization of disk assets, lowering dependency on new purchases, and a dramatic reduction in costs.
Tape has been having somewhat of a resurgence in the past few years. It will probably never be a viable backup solution again, but for archive and DR it may be the best long-term option. The technology development has not slowed, and now transfers data much faster than disk with roadmaps to well over 100TB/tape cartridge, and incredibly low MTBF (mean time between failure). Its a perfect forensic preservation medium, and nobody ever hacked a tape. Tapes highlights are as followed when compared to disk, SSD and NVMe (Using LTO9 form factor)
- Up to 1GB/second to transfer compressed data at optimal block and file size
- HDDs – 160 MB/s (SATA interfaces max out at 600 MB/s so that’s as fast as disk will go)
- SSDs – 600 MB/s
- NVMe wins here at 3 GB/s
- The UBER (Uncorrected Bit Error Rate, means before Reed Solomon error correction technology)) rate of LTO9 tape cartridges is way lower than all disk products. Tape now simply has a far superior fail rate to disk. Studies suggest this equates to 10,000 times more reliable than disk and 1,000 times more reliable than SSDs. Gone are the days of the failing tape. The reason principally lies in the use of Barium Ferrite and Strontium Ferrite as the recording material. Back in the day it was IronOxide FeO or ChromeDiOxide CrO2 (remember the audio cassettes)
- Most disk manufacturers would say 3 to 5 years, maybe 10. LTO9 claims that it will exceed 30 years. We think this number is much more likely to be 100 years+ in practice, given that we are still restoring 30 year old tapes today
Everybody’s situation and requirement will be unique. If you would like to learn more about whether this could be a solution for you, please contact us to discuss. We are the experts. It may even be the opportunity to clean up your archives, and organize it, resulting in faster time to locate data in the future. In today’s modern Digital Forensics practices you have to have NVMe, particularly in the work servers employed, the processing speed requirements from modern software tools just demands it. However, many don’t think through the ability of tiered solutions, and fewer still think about tape anymore. The expected benefits of a well organized tiered solution with tape at the deepest point include:
- Huge reductions in disk purchase costs
- Better use of production servers
- Less read failures
- Air-Gapped, un-hacked archives of client matter data
- With Invenire metadata portal managing the tapes, file location in seconds
- Solutions can be implemented at our site or yours
