Buyers of solid-state drives (SSDs) might face higher prices soon. Prices for consumer SSDs already went up a lot in the first quarter of this year. Now, experts predict they’ll go up even more in the next few months. This means people building PCs will have to spend more money.
A report from TrendForce, which analyzes the IT market, says consumer SSD prices rose by 23-28 percent in the first quarter. They expect prices to go up another 10-15 percent in the second quarter, even though not many people are buying SSDs right now.
The report also says prices for NAND Flash memory, which is used in SSDs and other devices, could go up by 13-18 percent in the second quarter of 2024. It looks at price trends for different types of NAND Flash products, like mobile memory, consumer and business SSDs, and the materials used to make them.
It’s important to mention that prices for business SSDs went up a lot last year. In the last three months of the year, prices increased by 15 percent. This trend of higher prices continued into the first quarter of 2024, with prices going up by another 23-28 percent, just like for consumer SSDs. Experts predict that prices for business SSDs will go up even more this quarter, by 20-25 percent. This is because there’s a lot of demand from companies that provide online services in North America and China.
In contrast to the business SSD market, it’s reported that people are being more careful when buying client SSDs. Some companies making PCs are cutting down on the number of SSDs they’re ordering for the second quarter of 2024. The big price increases will probably make these companies even less likely to order SSDs in the second half of the year. Even though people are being cautious, prices for NAND Flash wafers are expected to keep going up because manufacturers want to make more profit.
In the market for mobile NAND, there’s a lot of demand for eMMC from Chinese smartphone brands. Also, the UFS market is growing because there’s more demand in places like India and Southeast Asia. This is likely to make prices for both eMMC and UFS go up by 10-15 percent in the second quarter of 2024.
