Hard drives may finally run out by Christmas if this trend continues
Analytics firm Trendforce has forecast that the average selling price of NAND Flash, the underlying foundation of all, SSD (Solid State Drive) and microSD card will drop up to 15% in the current quarter. It fell nearly 25% in the last quarter leaving the largest manufacturers; Kioxia, Solidigm, Micron and WDC cut production to reduce supply in the market.
Weak demand among consumers and Enterprise SSDs Customers combined with Samsung’s reluctance to continue producing as much NAND as possible means that the price reductions we’ve seen over the past 12 months on SSD and microSD products are likely to continue without thinking. reduced with smaller capacity is gradually eliminated.
Samsung is the largest supplier of NAND Flash and has committed to investing heavily in R&D to stay ahead of the competition. SK Hynix and Micron announced in 2022 that they will launch 238 layers And 232 layers corresponding product that – on paper – will significantly reduce the cost of Terabytes for solid-state drives.
For obvious reasons, no vendor has released yet plc (level five cell) NAND, the next technological breakthrough that will enable even cheaper, high-capacity SSDs.
A data bloodbath on Christmas 2023?
The cheapest 1TB microSD card is currently on sale for around $75 at Amazon, down nearly 50% from a year ago. While we don’t expect the price to be halved, another 30% drop later this year seems reasonable, which would bring the price of a 1TB microSD card to almost $50.
This will affect smaller capacities (512GB, 256GB, 128GB) and we expect 64GB and 32GB microSD cards to be phased out entirely.
The same applies to USB flash drive where the cheapest genuine 256GB models are currently on sale for around $10 with vendors using multi-pack offers to entice customers with lower capacities. The fact that many recent laptops do not have a Type-A connector or a microSD card slot also significantly reduces the size of the total addressable market.
The most interesting market is still the SSD market where customers are having a really great day as prices continue to fall. The cheapest SSD per TB at the time of this writing is the Leven JS600 ($74.99 for 1.92TB), if the price drops another 30% over the next nine months, it will be on par with smaller capacity hard drives. like the Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM008.
These cheap models are 2.5 inches SATA storage devices and because they reality Equipped with SATA connectors, they will also quickly replace external hard drives with capacities up to 2TB. Even so, there are two trends worth noting: 2.5-inch drives are being phased out as they are being replaced by M.2 PCIe drives.
Larger capacity hard drives are safe for now but it’s only a matter of time before the next tier (3TB, 4TB) is coming. For instance, a Leven 4TB SSD retails for $180, still double the price of a WD Passport 4TB hard drive.