Thanks to skyrocketing TLC NAND costs (up 120% in two years), the price of SSD and HDD cards can be expected to rise dramatically as well, which means pain at the cash register when purchasing new technology.
TLC (Triple-level cell) is a type of NAND flash memory for SSDs and HDDs that, according to Wccftech, has reached $25.5 per 256GB drive and $48.5 per 512GB drive in terms of wholesale market prices. Coupled with declining product demand, it creates a scenario where companies need to dramatically increase NAND flash memory prices in response.
a report of Daily economic news states that manufacturers would need to increase prices by 40% and, for manufacturers to remain profitable, future price increases would need to be at least 50%. Because of this, manufacturers like Phison and Western Digital have already increased NAND flash memory prices by a whopping 55% for consecutive quarters.
Naturally, this means that the price of SSDs and HDDs 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.
SSD card development could be seriously hampered
This increase in the price of SSDs comes at a time when we are seeing significant advances in speed and memory size. Two examples are Micron 1TB SSD 3500which offers sequential reads and writes of up to 7,000 MB/s and 6,900 MB/s respectively, and the possibility of Samsung Petabyte SSD.
In other words, we could be seeing some of the best SSD on the market from 2024 and beyond, but that progress could be hindered by these anticipated price increases. And considering that this new technology would have already been more expensive, the potential new MSRP could be too high for many customers to afford.
In that case, it may be a good idea to avoid any of the new SSD cards entirely if you can’t afford to invest right now and instead buy the the best cheap SSD deals. Most consumers don’t need memory or speed, and even among professionals, it’s not a requirement.
