A new report is suggesting that NAND flash prices, and therefore the SSDs that exclusively use the memory storage technology, are going to rise by around 10%, according to industry sources.
We’ve seen a steady drop in the prices of solid state drives over the last 12 months or so, with the heady mixture of lower demand and excess stock driving the cost of a shiny new SSD down to unprecedented levels. So much so that you can now buy a genuinely pacey 1TB NVMe drive for about $120… that’s just 12c per GB.
Exploding smartphone specs and usage, coupled with the rise of solid state storage in the datacentre, had created a market which ballooned and NAND flash manufacturers made hay while the sun shone. Prices of NAND soared as production was tightly controlled by the few NAND makers of note, but things have changed and the price of NAND has crashed over the last year. Slowing smartphone sales matched by a contraction in demand from the datacentre market left a lot of flash memory for the SSD crew to play with, but it looks like the prices have now bottomed out.
The report comes from Digitimes in Taiwan (via Hardware.Info), which sites its classic industry sources as the ones suggesting that NAND prices have stopped falling and will rebound by 10% in the fourth quarter of this year. It suggests that with manufacturers cutting back production and a seasonal spike in demand, things are about to get a little pricey out there.
That would also suggest that maybe if you were waiting for Black Friday to bag a quality SSD deal you might be better served striking now while the iron is hot (?) and the price still low.
Our favourite SSD from a price/performance standpoint is the hugely impressive Addlink S70. It’s an NVMe drive sporting the same classic Toshiba 3D NAND / Phison memory controller combo used by a lot of big-name SSD manufacturers, and matches them in pace but for half the price.
Though, if you want the absolute best SSD around, then you can’t go wrong with a quality NVMe-based Samsung 970 EVO Plus, or Samsung 860 EVO if you need yourself a great-value SATA drive.