TrendForce says SSD prices haven't hit rock bottom yet

[Daniel Sims]

In a nutshell: Over the last few months, the NAND flash oversupply hitting the current post-boom tech industry hangover has drastically sunk solid-state storage prices. The latest analysis estimates the trend will continue for at least a little longer and possibly through the rest of the year, though it may level off as suppliers try to get inventories under control.

TrendForce's latest report on NAND flash indicates that SSD costs will slide by another five-to-ten percent during the second quarter of 2023. If consumer demand stabilizes, prices may rebound around the fourth quarter. However, falling demand could delay recovery.

Since SSD prices plummeted around 30 percent during the first quarter of this year, many consumers have likely waited to see how low they could go. If you have to get one now, it probably isn't a bad investment, but those who can wait should recheck prices around the summer.

Click to enlarge

Models that saw significant price cuts recently, like the 1TB WD Black SN770 NVMe SSD or the Samsung 870 Evo SATA drive, have stabilized since TechSpot last checked at the beginning of this month. The SN770 is still $60 compared to $90 at the beginning of the year, and the 870 Evo is still $65.

Additionally, faster and more expensive models that hadn't budged all year may start to tick downward. The 1TB Samsung 990 Pro was $170 at the beginning of the month but is $120 now. The WD Black NS850X, which TechSpot called the best high-performance SSD for early 2023, has stayed at $100 but could also slip, according to PCPartPicker's tracking.

Flash wafer prices will likely go flat shortly, but it's unclear when that development will impact end consumers. Like many tech products, NAND memory suffered a drop in demand as the economy slowed down over the last year. The pace and duration of the current price trend will depend on suppliers' ability to cut production appropriately.

Additionally, TrendForce projects enterprise SSDs could see prices fall by 8-13 percent over Q2 – steeper than consumer SSDs but still slower than their 13-18 percent Q1 drop. Mobile storage prices in Q2 could also see price drops similar to SSDs.

Image credit: Yutaka Tsutano

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https://www.techspot.com/news/98147-trendforce-ssd-prices-havent-hit-rock-bottom.html

 

[Clamp5347]

Soon approaching 50 USD per TB of nvme storage. Love to see it.

 

[nnguy2]

Good. I have a couple of 500gb ssds I'd like to consolidate into a 2tb ssd.

 

[yRaz]

Soon approaching 50 USD per TB of nvme storage. Love to see it.

it'd be nice if CPU manufacturers would stop pay walling PCI-e lanes so that we can actually take full advantage of said drives. I'm not saying we need 100+ lanes like in the HEDT space but 28 lanes on AMD's AM5 platform is hardly enough. They should give us enough lanes for a graphics card and at least 2NVME drives. I feel like SATA has stagnated as a standard and to replace it we need more PCI-e connectivity.

 

[toooooot]

Soon approaching 50 USD per TB of nvme storage. Love to see it.

Good time to remove 500gb drives and install 4tb drives.

 

[Blqckout]

The lexar 710 2tb is currently at 115 bucks and 4800 read and write speed if u want a good drive with 5 year warranty

 

[bviktor]

it'd be nice if CPU manufacturers would stop pay walling PCI-e lanes so that we can actually take full advantage of said drives. I'm not saying we need 100+ lanes like in the HEDT space but 28 lanes on AMD's AM5 platform is hardly enough. They should give us enough lanes for a graphics card and at least 2NVME drives. I feel like SATA has stagnated as a standard and to replace it we need more PCI-e connectivity.

Most customers don't need more than one drive, so obviously, manufacturers ain't gonna prioritize on that.

For the record, it's still 4 more than on AM4.

If you wanna build storage, then use storage hardware, not commodity hardware.

 

[yRaz]

Most customers don't need more than one drive, so obviously, manufacturers ain't gonna prioritize on that.

For the record, it's still 4 more than on AM4.

If you wanna build storage, then use storage hardware, not commodity hardware.

Wanting to have 2 or 3 drives is hardly "building out storage". Having a dedicated OS drive is pretty standard. If you want to talk about the 10 drives I have in my NAS, that's building out storage and I did it with "commodity hardware" but I did it with slower HDDS. 8 HDDS, 1 Sata SSD for the OS and a 1TB NVME drive for cache.

I still recommend using Sata HDDs for things like media storage but pretty much every computer I've build for people has had atleast 3 drives. If you want to make your media storage safe then add an extra drive and suddenly you have 4.

About the PCI lanes, 4 lanes are taken up by the AM4 chipset for IO connectivity so all you get is a graphics card and 1 full speed PCI-e device. If you want a sound card, net work card or basically anything else you lose it. On AM5 they increased this to 28 from 24 but we have a complete reliance on PCIe for expanded functionality and it's being pay walled. I don't need a $5000 CPU so I can run a sound card and graphics card. I don't mind paying for hardware when that hardware offers extra functionality. If spending an Extra $200 for a motherboard means I can run multiple NVME drives on modern hardware that's fine. But you go jump from consumer or "commodity" to HEDT it very quickly is a 10 fold increase in price.

This wouldn't be a problem if we didn't run absolutely over the PCIe bus. When I first got into computers it was not only typical, but expected that everything would be run on an expansion card. In the 90's and 2000's it was expected that you need a sound card, video card and network cards. I even remember installing ISA cards to add serial and parallel ports.

There are band aid solutions to this, PCI-e gen5 is fast enough that current graphics cards will not get bottlenecked at 8X but that's not even the point. The number of PCI lanes available on these motherboards don't match the physical connectors that they have. My motherboard has 2x16 slots but they run together than can only run at 8X, it has 4 PCI 1x slots and 2 m.2 NVME slots. On my 5700g I have 24 lanes but I effectively have 42 lanes worth motherboard connectivity.

Going back to cost, Manufacturers wouldn't have just put those features on a motherboard for no reason. It costs a not insignificant amount of money to design and install all those features.

But then we get into the whole problem with HEDT hardware. For longest time the biggest barrier to entry was price, but then AMD stopped supporting Threadripper and opened an exclusive deal with Lenovo Threadripper pro. Lets not forget what Lenovo does with hardlocking CPUs to their vendor hardware using AMD PSB. I would never buy into a workstation eco system with anything other than company money. The HEDT and workstation space is such a dumpster fire right now that I'm uncomfortable thinking about the size of that rabbit hole.


Threadripper has 88 lanes and threadripper pro has 128. This is great if you have 4 quadros feeding off of 16NVME storage for machine learning, but most people aren't doing that. The industry has decided that PCIe storage is the future and AMD has plenty of other compelling features on their high end platforms that they don't need to paywall PCI-e lanes. For me, I want a graphics card and 3 NVME drives. Other people could want a capture card, thunderbolt card and audio card.

I'm several tangents deep at this point, but I don't think it's too much to ask that we can have a graphics card + 3 full speed expansion slots

 

[Hotlynx16]

Most customers don't need more than one drive, so obviously, manufacturers ain't gonna prioritize on that.

For the record, it's still 4 more than on AM4.

If you wanna build storage, then use storage hardware, not commodity hardware.

I have a 2tb M2 main, a 1TB M2 secondary and a 1Tb 2.5", I guess I am not "most customers"!!