Although 3D NAND's flash memory producers are still cutting their production volumes so much that the prices of their products will continue to decline in the coming months. This is the conclusion reached by Trendfocus analysts. They believe that by the second half of 2023, the flash memory prices could have fallen by half the current level.
The decline in demand on the PC market by consumers and businesses means the imminent decline in demand for various computer components. The segment flashbacks in general and solid storage in particular are more striking than others. The key drivers of the fall in the flash memory market are described by analysts as the relative simplicity of its production, high competition and large stocks in warehouses.
Kioxia has reported a 30 per cent reduction in the volume of silicon plates for 3D NAND chips since October 1. The company also slowed down the production of 232 layered flash chips for 3D NAND. It should be noted that these chips produce one of the fastest solid storage devices with a capacity above 10 Gbit/s. However, the companies cannot immediately cut their production, as Trendfocus experts point out, so the stocks of chips will continue to be stored in warehouses. In turn, the producers of solid storage devices are reluctant to make new orders for chips, as their warehouses have accumulated large stocks of SSD that also need to be sold.
At the same site, Amazon, you can find a hard-line NVMe-P3-volume 500 Gbyte at a price of only $44. This is about 8.8 cents per gigabyte. There are also more accessible offers. For example, a 2.5-inch SSA SSD PNY CS9000 is offered for $31 or 6.2 cents per gigabyte. Despite the fact that memory prices are already very low, Trendfocus experts predict that by mid-2023, they will have dropped another 40-50 percent, which will further reduce the cost of solid storage.
It is now difficult to estimate how many SSDs and flash memory chips 3D NAND are in storage with dozens of manufacturers, but Trendfocus believes that these stocks will be sufficient for at least two quarters to supply the cloud computing segment as well as the PC manufacturers.
Analysts assume that the cost of storage will continue to decline over at least the next two quarters, with the SSD models that support PCIe 3.0 x4 and PCIe 4.0 x4 being the most cheap, with the new PCIe 5.0 x4 interface yet to come out and are unlikely to fall rapidly.