SSD prices are expected to increase significantly this year as NAND flash memory, commonly used in SSDs, is projected to see a price hike of up to 40%. The report comes from multiple sources at notable chipmaking companies including SK Hynix, Micron, and Samsung.
NAND is a type of non-volatile memory that does not require power to retain data. It is commonly used in SSDs, smartphones, USB flash drives, and more, meaning that all such devices are expected to see a steep rise in prices in late 2020.
Various factors come into play for this price boost. It could be a simple supply-demand issue due to the insufficient supply of materials required for NAND flash memory. This has the potential to hurt NAND’s long term prices as production will slow down and would be incapable of meeting the increasing demand.
A recent incident at Samsung, where one of its NAND flash manufacturing plants was closed down temporarily, is also worth mentioning here. Its Hwaseong plant went out of order for 3 days due to a power outage. This reportedly caused millions of dollars in losses as chip manufacturing is a power-sensitive process and the smallest outage can result in several wasted batches.
However, on a positive note, this price hike is not expected to occur until Q4 (October – December) this year, so there is still quite some time before you can grab SSDs and USB flash drives at reasonable prices.
Via Wccftech
