SSD Prices are About to Soar: Analysts

If you’ve been considering buying an SSD or upgrading your existing drive, now would be a good time to do it. A new report from an industry research firm projects that SSD prices are about to rise quite a bit as the NAND flash world seeks to recoup its losses from the past few quarters. The report predicts higher prices across the board for SSDs as we head into Spring, with enterprise customers being hit especially hard.
The new forecast for the NAND flash market comes from Trendforce, a research firm that publishes its findings on the PC industry and predicts where the chips will fall in the near term. Its latest report states it expects NAND flash prices to increase between 13% to 18% overall in the second quarter, with enterprise buyers seeing the biggest increases. This could occur despite large-scale NAND manufacturers such as Western Digital and Kioxia boosting production after last year’s near-total shutdown of NAND manufacturing due to excess inventory.
The client SSD market is currently being pushed around by multiple factors, which the report says will lead to a more cautious buying strategy by OEMs. Prices for these buyers are expected to rise between 10-15%, which could kneecap SSD orders in the second half of the year. The report also says SSD orders have been soft in the post-Lunar New Year period, which ended on Feb. 20, so companies are less incentivized to stockpile NAND.
Enterprise customers will see the biggest price increases as companies prepare for the peak buying season in the latter half of the year. Prices for these NAND contracts could rise as high as 25% in the short term as buyers attempt to acquire as much NAND as they can in anticipation of a strong Q3 and Q4. As such, purchasing volumes are expected to grow in Q2, and SSD manufacturers want to capitalize on that trend by boosting prices.
Though 2023 was a difficult year for NAND flash and PCs in general, the industry is expected to rebound in 2024. Everyone who bought or upgraded their PC in the 2020 pandemic is expected to upgrade or buy a new system, and there’s also a lot of new hardware launching later this year. Windows 11 is expected to get a big update sometime this year, which could spur a PC upgrade cycle. Underpinning all this activity is the AI boom, which is not expected to recede any time soon.
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