NAND Flash Memory Prices Hiked

[Charles P. Jefferies]

NAND Flash Memory Prices Hiked

According to a DigiTimes report, a price hike in NAND flash memory prices will significantly affect the notebook SSD market this year. A 16GB NAND flash memory chip in the fourth quarter of 2008 was $1.80, but right now the same chip is $4.10, a 127.8% increase. This naturally makes it much more expensive for notebook makers to add SSDs onto notebooks and the increase will affect the SSD market accordingly.

Full Story (DigiTimes.com)

[Rob41]

Wow, that's quite a price increase! Hopefully increased adoption of this tech, and better production methods will help reduce the amount of the increase.

[davepermen]

AAAAAAAAAHHHH

that hurts

[Evolution]

And suddenly mechanical hard drives are looking interesting again...

[davepermen]

uhm... no

[pro101]

If it's like oil, it will go back down. Because technology components evolve fast, they actually depreciate faster than any commodity. SSD prices are bound to keep falling.

[Kamin_Majere]

NOOOOOO

Thats a HUGE hike. I really hope we dont go back to the days of 1000 dollar SSD's

Come on Intel and 34nm process... show us the magic

[Rob41]

And suddenly mechanical hard drives are looking interesting again...

Not to me they aren't.

My old 8 track player was cool in it's day but I'd never trade it for my MP3 player now that I've seen the light.

Conventional mechanical HDD's, although still mainstream and useful, are in the beginning stages of their death throes.

Although nand is a major part of the cost of an SSD, it's not the only factor.

The retail price of an SSD will not rise by 127.8%. I expect the price increase of any given SSD to rise by only a small percentage.

I'm surprised we're still stuck with mechanical optical drives. I'd happily pay a premium for physical media on some type of flash drive rather than a disc. If this type of media storage replaced discs, the price of the flash memory would eventually come down.

[chlaw]

NAND Flash Memory Prices Hiked

According to a DigiTimes report, a price hike in NAND flash memory prices will significantly affect the notebook SSD market this year. A 16GB NAND flash memory chip in the fourth quarter of 2008 was $1.80, but right now the same chip is $4.10, a 127.8% increase. This naturally makes it much more expensive for notebook makers to add SSDs onto notebooks and the increase will affect the SSD market accordingly.

Full Story (DigiTimes.com)

I did not know that 16GB NAND memory chips were so cheap. Why SSD drives were so expensive then?

[Althernai]

I did not know that 16GB NAND memory chips were so cheap. Why SSD drives were so expensive then?

It's 16Gb which is actually only 2GB.

I don't see much reason to worry here. Most consumers never saw the $1.80/16Gb price to begin with; this would correspond to $0.90 per GB or $256 for a 256 GB drive (since the flash accounts for 90% of the costs, the total cost is $1/GB). I don't think even the JMicron garbage was sold for such low prices and I know for a fact that Intel's drives went for more than 4 times that and drives with other decent controllers (e.g. Indilinx) for more than double. The only way this could affect you is if you were buying the SSD from a major OEM which gets them at close to the cost of components -- for everyone else, the price is not dominated by NAND flash, although it does scale almost linearly with size.