The price of SSD is set to drop as the industry is currently facing a very large surplus of NAND flash memory. Significant price drops in SSD could be seen in 2019 according to some analysts’ prediction. You may read this post in detail for more information.
Nowadays, many users migrate their windows OS to SSD as SSD offers users a wonderful experience in speed and improves computer performance. SSD provides better performance and reliability over an HDD, but its price is also higher than HDD.
Recently, a market expert has predicted that due to the oversupply of NAND flash memory, the price of SSD is set to drop in 2019. According to the market analyst Jim Handy’s prediction at the Flash Memory Summit, flash memory industry is set for a great “download pricing correction” in 2019 or maybe it could be a collapse potentially. Currently, the market value of 64-layer 3D NAND is around $0.30 per GB, but Handy believes that SSD prices could be as low as eight cents per gigabyte if prices crash. Handy said that even without a full collapse, the downturn will be the biggest “price correction in the history of semiconductor products.”
This is the result of the current overpricing combined with increased supplies. As many NAND memory manufacturers want to seek profits from SSD market, the supplies of NAND Flash increased 45% in this year alone. However, there is not a similar rise in demand, which means prices are going to tumble in dramatic fashion.
According to the current SSD prices and the oversupply of NAND flash memory, it is believed that the price of commercially available solid-state storage could drop as much as 75%. In the next year the price of SSD could be closer to the price of HDD. At that time, HDD sales would decline significantly.
As manufacturers see the oversupply of NAND flash memory, they might shift their manufacturing over to DRAM, which could be less competitive. Handy also believes that the over-supply of 3D NAND could lead to a similar over-supply of DRAM in the near future.
“Some 70 percent of total industry flash is 3D NAND, with the remainder the older 2D or planar NAND. This manufacturing capacity could be migrated to making DRAM instead – this could result in DRAM capacity over-supply in the future.”
Howard Marks, chief scientist with Deep StorageNet, also spoke at the Flash Memory Summit. He said that a five-times differentiation in the cost per gigabyte between enterprise SSDs and HDDs would be sufficient to cause cannibalization.
If Handy’s predictions come true, the industry could be in for a 25-percent price reduction in NAND and a 75-percent drop for nearline/high-cap SSD’s. This could result in significant stock valuation shifts for some manufacturers.
For instance, Seagate’s revenues are mainly from disk drive and nearline/high-cap sales. Currently, its shares are selling for $51.42. Cannibalization could cause its stock to dip to around $44/share, according to a Goldman Sachs analyst.
About half of the revenue of Western Digital comes from flash memory, so it’s not so easy to be affected by disk cannibalization.
“However, it is more exposed than Seagate to a NAND pricing collapse,” said the analysts.
No matter what it looks like the SSD consumer will be the winner in the end. For those who want to save a few pennies, it seems that 2019 will be a great time to pick up the mass storage SSD they’ve always dreamed of. With prices set to plummet, are you planning to pick up a new SSD next year?