You’ll be paying much more for SSD cards this year – here’s why
Thanks to skyrocketing TLC NAND costs (up 120% in two years), you can expect the price of SSD and HDD cards to rise dramatically as well, meaning a pain at the checkout when buying new technology.
TLC (Triple-level cell) is a type of NAND flash memory for SSD and HDDs that, as reported by Wccftech, has reached $25.5 per unit for 256GB and $48.5 per unit for 512GB in terms of wholesale prices. Combined with declining product demand, this creates a scenario where companies must dramatically increase NAND flash prices in response.
A report from Economic daily news states that manufacturers should increase prices by 40% and that to maintain profitability, future price increases will need to be at least 50% for manufacturers. As a result, manufacturers like Phison and Western Digital have already increased NAND flash drive prices by as much as 55% in consecutive quarters.
This obviously means that the price of SSD and HDD will also skyrocket. So if you've been waiting for the right time to invest in next-generation storage solutions, now is the time to dive in before market prices start to reflect this new reality.
The development of SSD cards can be seriously hampered
This spike in SSD prices comes at a time when we are seeing serious improvements in speed and memory size. Two examples are Micron 3500 1TB SSDthat offers sequential read and write speeds of up to 7,000 MB/s and 6,900 MB/s respectively, and the ability to The Petabyte SSD from Samsung.
In other words, we could see some best SSDs come to market in 2024 and beyond, but that progress could be hampered by these expected price increases. And given that this new technology would have already been more expensive, the potential new MSRP could be far too high for many customers to afford.
In that case, it might be a good idea to avoid the brand new SSD cards altogether if you can't afford to invest right now, and instead get the best cheap SSD deals. Most consumers don't need the memory and speed, and even among professionals it's not a requirement.