Rumors about rising SSD prices have become a chorus of voices of late, and here's another report weighing in and underlining the likelihood of solid state drives becoming more expensive very soon.
German tech site Computerbase (via PC Gamer) highlighted a report from The Chosun Daily, a South Korean newspaper, claiming that Samsung has made a massive cut to production levels of its NAND chips.
Those are the modules that are the actual storage of the integrated SSDs, and production levels have supposedly been cut in half.
With a 50% drop in production, Samsung's chip inventory will obviously be much smaller in the future. This means that SSD manufacturers will pay more for that NAND and will naturally pass those costs on to the consumer in the prices of the drives.
Samsung has the largest presence in the NAND market, accounting for around 30% of total sales volume, so this could certainly have a bigger impact.
Additionally, Computerbase notes that the second-largest NAND producer, SK Hynix, plans to follow in Samsung's footsteps and reduce production in a similar way. (However, in this case we are not given any exact quantification.)
Analysis: skyrocketing prices
So is this bad news for consumers? Yes, of course, with the exception that any individual report must be taken with a lot of salt.
It is possible that the South Korean source has crossed wires somewhere, or that the aforementioned 50% cut is misplaced (even if there is indeed a decline in production, it may not be to this extent).
What makes this seem more likely is that, as we mentioned at the beginning, there are a lot of rumors and predictions from analyst firms that SSD price increases are coming.
Last month we heard that higher capacity SSDs (2TB and 4TB models) will skyrocket, and that exact term was used by an industry expert in the report that was issued. This adds to a lot of previous rumors about the price increase of SSDs.
At this point, it would be a surprise if the price of solid state drives, particularly some of the best SSDs out there, didn't increase substantially as the year 2024 progresses. As with any market, there are ups and downs, and we can only hope May the price slope that we seem to be currently ascending flatten out before long and hopefully turn in the other direction. In the end it will, of course; As always, it's just a matter of time.
Whatever the case, if you're looking to buy one of the best SSDs, it's looking increasingly likely that the best decision is to buy it now rather than wait.
