SSDs will continue to increase in price before your eyes. Prices are expected to deteriorate throughout the second quarter

In January, we wrote about the fact that SSDs will become more expensive, or rather continue to become more expensive, because the best time to buy was last summer and things were already deteriorating in the fall. Unfortunately, it seems that the second quarter of the year, which is just starting, will not bring an improvement, but rather a continuation of this negative trend. Analyst firm TrendForce forecasts prices will rise by up to 15% during the second quarter, so if you’re waiting for better prices, you’ll probably be waiting quite a while.

According to TrendForce, the market for NAND and SSD memory is still in a state where manufacturers are keeping production relatively low (although WD and Kioxia increased production slightly in the first quarter), so there is an excess of demand over supply leading to a thinning of the memory stock in distribution and price increases. According to TrendForce’s estimate, during the second quarter, the prices of NAND memories themselves will increase by 5-10% when concluding long-term contracts compared to the situation at the end of the first quarter.

10-15% price increase in the coming months

However, the effect should be stronger for the prices of consumer SSDs for computers and laptops (probably also because these effects are slightly delayed in them). For them, TrendForce expects their prices to rise by 10-15% during the second quarter.

Naturally, this increase will add to the previous price increases during Q4 2023 (13-18%) and during the first quarter of this year, when things ended up being even worse than the original estimate, because while in January analysts expected an increase of 15-20%, now the TrendForce report already estimates +23-28% for this period (not final figures yet).

If you combine this past half year with the second quarter hike now coming, it would mean that between September 2023 and June 2024 prices will rise by a total of 53-74%. Of course, this may vary in practice for different models.

More expensive “Enterprise” SSDs for servers and similar sectors will become even more expensive than ordinary ones – their prices are expected to rise by 20-25% in the second quarter. On the other hand, storage for mobile devices such as eMMC and UFS are expected to increase in price “only” by 10-15%. If all these types of storage and raw NAND memory are averaged, it comes out to be a 13-18% price increase for Q2 2024.

The fact that NAND memories alone (both TLC and QLC) are expected to see lower price increases (“only” 5-10%) than all SSDs perhaps gives some hope that the price cycle is already starting to approach its peak or at least slow down. In Q3 2024, the increase in SSD prices could also be more modest than the current 10-15%, but the price increase will probably continue – however, TrendForce does not issue any estimates yet. The question is whether it can stop or turn around again in Q4, but even so, the price increase will probably last for almost a year, so this autumn SSD prices will be very ugly compared to what they were last year.

That is, unless there is some unexpected crisis that would sharply worsen the demand for computers, so that the OEM market would stop buying and memory and SSD manufacturers would suddenly face a drop in demand, which would force them to cut prices.

Sources: TrendForce, Tom’s Hardware