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Final 12 months was the proper time to purchase an SSD. For lower than $100, you would get a few terabytes of actually quick storage, even from the highest manufacturers. That is not the case now and you must store round to discover a whole lot, and the rationale for that is easy: Samsung, the most important provider of flash reminiscence, has lowered manufacturing to such an extent that its factories are churning out 50% fewer chips than within the earlier 12 months.
Information of this transfer (through ComputerBase) is not notably shocking because the business had been speaking about decreasing output for whereas. Nevertheless, the sheer measurement of the lower is kind of alarming and it is solely going to imply that SSD costs will proceed to rise, because the stock of flash reminiscence chips begins to dwindle.
It’s because it isn’t simply Samsung that is scaling again manufacturing: Different NAND producers, reminiscent of Kioxia, Micron, and SK Hynix, will nearly definitely observe go well with. By constraining provide, the excessive demand will drive costs to rise, although that is one thing that is been happening within the flash reminiscence business for years.
And extra just lately, the expansion in AI supercomputers can also be partly accountable for the rise in SSD costs, because the creation of all these machines for generative AI requires hundreds of medium-capacity, high-speed flash reminiscence chips. The final server market nonetheless prefers the normal HDD as the first selection of long-term storage, although SSDs are making headway on this space, too.
Nevertheless, it isn’t essentially all doom and gloom. Some suppliers could select to not observe Samsung’s lead and as a substitute do the polar reverse. Chinese language producers reminiscent of YMTC, whose reminiscence chips are utilized by Silicon Energy, ADATA, and numerous others, might even see this as a possibility to flood the market with mountains of low-cost NAND flash.
One would possibly assume that since lots of the greatest solid-state drives are created by the chip producers themselves (e.g. Samsung, Western Digital, Essential), it can solely be the lesser-known manufacturers that may snap them up.
However there are some glorious SSDs on the market, such because the Lexar NM790, which use YMTC chips they usually’re simply as quick as something from Samsung, and all with out the excessive price ticket.
So whereas we will anticipate SSD costs to proceed to rise all through 2024, I might be very shocked if there wasn’t a push from opponents within the NAND flash market to make a bid in your pockets with some tasty offers. As at all times, we’ll let you already know if we spot something value your hard-earned money.
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