The Trendforce analysts' cabinet in anticipation of the NAND Flash sales prize, the construction block based on all the SSDs (Solid State Drives) and the microSD cards, just chutera just 15% au cours du trimester in class. It's already down almost 25% in the last quarter, which has led to the largest manufacturers; Kioxia, Solidigm, Micron and WDC will reduce their production to reduce the supply in the market.
Weak customer demand for consumer and enterprise SSDs, combined with Samsung's reluctance to continue producing as much NAND as possible, means that the price decline we've seen over the past 12 months in SSDs and microSDs will likely continue unabated. decrease with smaller and smaller capacities.
Samsung is the largest provider of NAND Flash and has already committed to invest heavily in R&D to stay ahead of its rivals. SK Hynix and Micron announced in 2022 that they would launch 238-layer and 232-layer products respectively, which on paper will significantly lower the cost per terabyte for SSDs.
For obvious reasons, no vendor has yet released PLC (penta level cell) NAND, the next technological breakthrough that will enable even cheaper high-capacity SSDs.
Data bloodbath for Christmas 2023?
The cheapest 1TB microSD cards currently sell for around $75 on Amazon, almost 50% less than a year ago. While we don't expect prices to halve, another 30% drop by the end of the year seems reasonable, which would bring the price of a 1TB microSD card closer to €50.
This would have a ripple effect on the smaller capacities (512GB, 256GB, 128GB) and we expect the 64GB and 32GB microSD to be removed from the market entirely.
The same goes for USB drives, where the cheapest genuine 256GB models currently sell for around $10, with sellers turning to multi-pack deals to lure customers with lower capacities. The fact that many recent laptops lack a Type-A connector or microSD card slot also significantly reduces the size of the total addressable market.
The most exciting market remains the SSD market, where customers are having a blast as prices continue to drop. The cheapest SSD per TB at the time of writing is the Leven JS600 (€74,99 for 1,92 TB), another ~30% drop over the next nine months will put it on par with lower capacity HDDs like the Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM008.
These budget models are 2,5-inch SATA storage devices and, being de facto equipped with a SATA connector, they should also quickly supplant external hard drives with capacities of up to 2TB. Be aware of two trends: 2,5-inch drives are all the rage. output and are being replaced by M.2 PCIe drives.
Higher capacity hard drives are safe for now, but it's only a matter of time before the next level (3TB, 4TB) is about to disappear. A 4TB SSD from Leven retails for $180, about double the price of a 4TB WD Passport hard drive, for example.