Why aren’t SSD prices dropping?

Audigex

Audigex

Audigex

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3 Feb 2009
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More importantly, why do they appear to be going UP?

  • In September 2013 I bought a 128 GB SSD for £80
  • In August 2015 I bought a 250 GB SSD for £80
  • In December 2015 I bought a 250 GB SSD for £50
  • In April 2016 I bought a 480 GB SSD for £90
That seems like a fairly sensible progression. Now, though, I go to buy a new SSD and the price is up massively - a 250 GB SSD is now 30% more expensive than I paid for a 480 GB drive two years ago. All SATA drives, so I’m not comparing SATA to PCIe or something silly

What’s happening here? Is this just bad timing during a shortage, and is this situation expected to change - or is this likely to be longer lasting?

I know cryptocurrency mining has pushed graphics cards up, but this seems crazy - prices are up significantly on 2 years ago.
 
NAND shortages (actual partly due to some natural disasters) and "shortages" IIRC there is an investigation going on into supposed collusion to manufacture "shortages" of NAND and profiteering.
 
Yeah, the stuff is in short supply and high demand so manufacturers are going to keep it at expensive as they can for as long as they can. Whilst it still sells, they'll charge as much as they can.
 
Demand is outstripping supply by a large margin.

It's a balancing game, new fabrication plants can take years to get up to full production, though they require huge investment.
 
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It's memory cards too. A little over a year ago I purchased a 64GB class10 kingston for only £13. Now the same card is £20.

It's because of the new phones they are releasing every week. Just look on GSMarena, look at the list of brands on the left and then look how many new phones get released every single month.

All earth resources are getting milked like no tomorrow in order to manufacture disposable phones.

It's because they're greedy and want to milk as much money as possible. An SSD has a relatively long lifespan so if someone buys a SSD and uses it for 10 years then the manufacturer is not making as much money. But if they put the memory in disposable mobile phones instead, they can keep on making apps bigger so you run out of storage, and the lifespan of phones is about 1-2 years before they slow it down with bigger and more bloated apps.

https://sensortower.com/blog/ios-app-size-growth
 
hornetstinger said:
Fairly obvious prices stay the same, but capacity goes up.
Click to expand...
At the same time speed is going down (race to the bottom) along with endurance. Cheaper per-GB achieved via inferior tech.

Certain budget SSDs are in fact slower in selected workloads than mechanical drives.
 
Noticed in a couple of tech videos lately (think one was Linus) they mentioned that they were seeing a reduction in endurance numbers for the mainstream and down SSDs and micro SD cards :( one model SD card they were talking about the writes had gone down from over 10K to 5K with a revision of the card.
 
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