01-11-2018, 05:35 AM
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ssd-pri...36266.html
Quote:In August, we said the consumer SSD market would level off but that shoppers would not see any major price drops until late 2018. Just weeks ago, reports spread across the web proclaiming an end to the NAND shortage. In some markets, that's true, but it's important to understand that the consumer market is different from the enterprise market.
Most of the new 256Gbit 64-Layer NAND available today feeds the enterprise demand, and prices are on a downward slope. On the consumer side, we see some incremental price reductions from the companies with NAND manufacturing capability, but not the free-fall we hoped for.
It's CES time, and we should be swimming in new products on display, but that's not happening this year, which seems odd on the surface. All of the conditions are right for the transition to NVMe. In a normal year, the front page of this publication would be full of new SSDs. Granted, there are some products on display, but very few are "ready for retail."
64-layer 3D NAND is shipping, but the 256Gbit die will come and go rapidly. That's what makes this NAND cycle different. Many of the companies we've spoken to do not want to invest in products with such a limited shelf life. The 512Gbit die are right around the corner from the fabs. Some estimates put a major ramp up coming before mid year. The technology offers a 2x capacity increase while taking only a little more space on the wafer. The bits per wafer doesn't double, but it gets very close. The retail products coming in the second half of 2018 with have a heavy impact on SSD pricing. Some estimates from engineers we've spoken with put retail pricing on track for a 20% to 30% reduction over similar-capacity products shipping today.