SSD could hasten demise of HDD as price parity looms in 2023
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At least two manufacturers have their 2TB . diminished SSD to less than $100 in recent days on Amazon, an extraordinary rock bottom price that was reached outside of Amazon Prime Day and Black Friday/Cyber ββMonday.
Teamgroup, with its SATA-based AX2 (opens in new tab)and To live (opens in new tab) are the first to cross the $50 per TB mark, and many more are likely to follow in the coming weeks/months.
According to analyst firm TrendForce, NAND flashthe basic building block of all so-called solid state storage (e.g. SSD, eMMC, microSD cards, flash drives, etc.) an oversupply caused by a combination of increased inventory and a decline in demand (both from consumers and businesses). This, in turn, will lead some companies to cut their prices significantly by as much as 20% as we approach the end of the year.
Price parity with hard drives on the way?
TrendForce analyst Bryan Ao said: TechRadar ProβAs NAND price continues to see gloomy price [sic] until 2023, more and more suppliers are offering QLC solutions in the market. Based on estimates, it is possible to see suppliers offering a 2TB QLC SSD solution [sic] under 80 in 2023 Black Friday. If we have to predict the percentage of that scenario, it’s 30%.”
2TB seems to be the sweet spot where price parity is in between hard disks and SSD can happen. There are not enough 4TB SSD SKUs on the market and the prices of 1TB SSD have not dropped as fast as their 2TB siblings. Hard drives also have: seen a significant drop in demand but thanks to vertical integration, the largest suppliers have been able to manage inventory much better and prices have remained quite good.
Beyond the generally gloomy macroeconomic factors, other variables have accelerated the decline in solid state drive prices. The move to 176-layer technology means that larger capacity SSDs can be produced at a similar cost, meaning lower capacity (128GB, 256GB) drives are no longer financially viable. There’s also the fact that stocks of SSD that use the older SATA technology will likely be liquidated to make way for the newer (and smaller) PCIe-based NVMe drives.
What now?
So where does that leave us? At the time of writing, a 1TB internal SSD costs about two-thirds more than a comparable hard drive of the same capacity/form factor (2.5in). The cheapest 2TB SSD costs just over twice the price of a 2TB HDD.
A 30% drop – as predicted by TrendForce – brings the price of a 1TB SSD to within a few dollars of a 1TB HDD. At that point, the only remaining reason to buy a hard drive of this capacity is all but gone. SSDs are typically faster, much more resilient, lighter, have a longer warranty, and consume less power.
Larger hard drive capacities are safe for now as they remain unchallenged, at least when it comes to value for money, above 4TB for hyperscale applications (eg. web hosting, file hosting, cloud storage, Cloud backup).