Analysis company Trendforce predicts the average selling price of NAND Flash SSD (Solid State Drive) and microSD card This quarter will be down by as much as 15%. It has dropped nearly 25% in the last quarter, prompting the largest manufacturers; Kioxia, Solidigm, Micron and WDC to cut production to reduce market supply.
weak consumer demand, Enterprise SSD Customers, combined with Samsung’s reluctance to continue producing as much NAND, means that the price drops we’ve seen for SSD and microSD products over the past 12 months are likely to continue, while smaller capacities will be phased out.
Samsung is the largest supplier of NAND flash memory and has pledged to invest heavily in research and development to stay ahead of competitors. SK hynix and Micron announce they will launch in 2022 238 floors and 232 floors Respectively – on paper – will significantly reduce the terabyte cost of solid-state drives.
For obvious reasons, no vendor releases yet Programmable Controllers (Five-Level Cell) NAND, the next technological breakthrough that will make SSDs cheaper and higher capacity.
Data carnage before Christmas 2023?
The cheapest 1TB microSD card is currently selling for about $75 on Amazon, a nearly 50% discount from a year ago. While we don’t expect the price to halve, another 30% drop by the end of the year seems reasonable, which would bring the price of a 1TB microSD card closer to $50.
This will have a knock-on effect on smaller capacities (512GB, 256GB, 128GB), and we expect 64GB and 32GB microSD to exit the market entirely.
Also applies to USB flash drive The cheapest of these, a genuine 256GB model, currently sells for around $10, with vendors offering multi-pack deals to lure customers with lower capacities. The fact that many recent laptops don’t have Type-A connectors or microSD card slots also greatly reduces the size of the overall addressable market.
The most exciting market remains the SSD market, and as prices continue to drop, customers will have an absolute live day. At the time of writing, the cheapest SSD per terabyte is the Leven JS600 ($74.99 for 1.92TB), with a further decline of about 30% over the next nine months, which will put it on par with smaller capacity hard drives like the Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM008.
These cheap models are 2.5 inch SATA storage devices because they are de facto They come with SATA connectors and should quickly replace external hard drives with capacities up to 2TB. There are two trends worth keeping in mind though: 2.5-inch drives are on their way out and 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 tiers (3TB, 4TB) are out. Leven’s 4TB SSD retails for $180, still about double the price of a 4TB WD Passport hard drive.
