NAND Flash Memory Prices Hiked

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)

 

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.

 

AAAAAAAAAHHHH

that hurts

 

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

 

uhm... no

 

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.

 

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

 

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.

 

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

 

It's 16G b 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.

 

It was GB in the OP. It has surprised me. Thank you for clarifying it.

 

giga- bit

8 BITs = 1 byte
1024 bytes =1 kilobyte
1024 kilobytes = 1 Megabyte
1024 Megabytes = 1 giga byte


Like binary ex. 00100011

 

Actually the controller is the largest price of a SSD, but having the Flash jump to over 4dollars per 16Gb is really going to hurt. That still puts the flash itself almost on level with the controllers... thats going to yeild quite a bit more expensive SSD's again

 

i was told by one of my companies i deal with ram will be seeing a hike also as it did a couple months ago.. im hearing around 10-15% more coming soon directly from the company rep..

 

I sure hope those crap jmicron controllers didn't cost more than a couple of cents.

 

They were relatively cheap... but cost (IMO) more than they were worth. Especially with alot of places just using them to "pop" into the SSD market.

The problem with the new NAND costs is now the good controller SSD's are going to cost a good bit more at each capacity point

 

Awesome! More profits for the computer industry to re-invest into new and exciting products for the future.

The industry can't continue to perpetually sell their products at a loss or a near-loss. Nor can it live on its past legacy of R&D, without significant renewal.

 

I hope the prices go back down before Christmas, I want my next lappy to have a SSD.

 

I think I will stop my plan to upgrade SSD in my laptop and wait for better price/capacity.

 

HDD for my next laptop. Will buy an SSD once capacities go up and prices go down.

 

It's in the nature of memory chips -- especially flash (SSD) -- to be very volatile, but always trending lower over the somewhat longer term. (Flash prices were over $30 a MEGABYTE in the mid-to-late 90's!).
Fabs - the factories that are needed to produce NAND and NAND controllers -- cost billions to build and tons to maintain and run. So when flash prices trend as low as they have as quickly as they have, NAND producers oftenlose a lot of money, and then either go out of business and/or shift their fab's business to other, then more profitable, forms of memory. When supply of NAND gets low enough relative to demand, the prices start going up again. If they would not, the bottom line is that companies would forever cease making NAND.
So it's a necessary, albeit painful cycle.

 

Not according to the article in the first post:

The controller costs whatever Intel, Samsung, etc. say it costs (i.e. the actual cost of manufacturing is small compared to the markup). If they believe it is in their best interest to lower that cost, they can easily do it by a factor of 2 or more.

We are now in Q3 2009. Have you seen a single SSD that has actually gone up in price, either now or in the past 3 months? In fact, the prices are still falling. All this means is that if you buy Intel's 80GB SSD for $300, Intel only pockets $118 of that while $164 goes to the chipmakers and the rest goes into the controller and miscellaneous costs. Intel & Co. are surely far less pleased with this arrangement than with the one they had in Q4 2008, but they have some of the world's deepest pockets and can easily make do without raising prices and scaring people off.

 

Almost all SSDs have gone up in price. I've been keeping tabs throughout the last month. Intel at it's lowest was low-mid $200, now it's back up to $300+. Same with the Indilinx (Vertex was low $300, now it's mid $300) and Samsungs. While on the yearly average it has decreased, monthly and daily it has gone up a bit.

 

^^ same with ram.. 4gb ddr2 was down to under 30$ for a long while now its all back up to mid 40-50$ range with a few rebates around but nothing like before

 

DDR2 RAM is different -- the suppliers know that there will be less demand for it and they cut production well in excess of that. Just like DDR is now more expensive than DDR2, DDR2 will soon be more expensive than DDR3 and it will stay that way.

On the other hand, the prices of SSDs might fluctuate slightly upwards at times, but they're definitely headed down in the long term as well as the medium term and the NAND hike has not affected that. For example, Intel's latest 80 GB SSD is MSRP $265 which means that once various sales are taken into account, it will be cheaper than the old one ever was.

 

That's mainly due to the next generation having a better and lower production fab. If you look in the past few months SSD prices for the same generation have been steadily going up. Of course if you look at the long term over years, it has gone down, but the NAND hike HAS made an impact.