This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of apply.

NAND flash

For the last few years, SDD prices have been falling steadily, thanks to increased NAND production past multiple companies and the transition to 3D NAND, which offers vastly increased densities for lower toll-per-bit. That trend is expected to accept a hit in Dec, with significant price increases expected for Q4. If you're planning to buy an SSD for Christmas, in other words, you might want to practise then now.

Co-ordinate to DRAMeXchange via CTimes, average contract prices for MLC NAND flash drives are expected to ascension by 6-10% , while TLC products are anticipated to rising by 6-ix%. MLC, or multi-level cell NAND stores two bits of data per cell, while triple-level cell (TLC) drives can store three bits of data per cell. TLC drives tend to be cheaper than their MLC equivalents for this reason, though the lower cost likewise comes with some drawbacks. TLC drives mostly have a much lower number of program/erase cycles and significantly lower write speeds (there'south a read speed gap every bit well, simply it tends to exist much smaller). It should besides be noted that the P/E cycle penalty for TLC NAND is really only a problem for traditional planar NAND — Samsung'southward 3D TLC NAND can manage more than 20K program-erase cycles, which is actually higher than most planar MLC memory. Nosotros explain the departure betwixt 3D and traditional NAND here, but if you're in the market for a drive, I recommend opting for 3D NAND when possible. If you want more data on how NAND works in general and why SSDs are faster than difficult drives, yous tin can find that information hither.

"The price gap of 128GB and 256GB SSDs versus 500 GB and 1TB HDDs grew larger than expected in the 2d one-half of 2016 due to the sharp rise in SSD prices," Alan Chen, senior inquiry manager of DRAMeXchange, told CTimes. "Nonetheless, SSD demand in the PC-OEM market is gaining strong momentum equally SSDs in general have surpassed HDDs in terms of price to performance. The pace of SSD adoption in both consumer and commercial segments of the notebook market has exceeded DRAMeXchange'due south interpretation. "Irrespective of the undersupply situation in the NAND Flash market place, the SSD adoption rate in the global notebook marketplace is certain to pass 30% this yr. Furthermore, this effigy is expected to exist in a higher place 50% sometime within the 2017~2018 menstruation."

Gartner_Inflection_Point

As SSD prices drop, more than companies are using them in place of hard drives. Data by Gartner, Apr 2015.

Increased prices hateful increased revenue, and Samsung is expected to be the big winner here, with a twenty% improvement in 3D NAND shipments in Q4 compared to Q3, while Hynix and Toshiba are expected to eke out smaller gains. Western Digital has begun transitioning to its own 64-layer 3D flash and is mass producing a 48-layer version of the same technology already. For now, Western Digital is focusing more on memory cards, USB drives, and eMMC-compatible hardware for smartphones, tablets, and other mobile products.

The shortages are being driven by increased demand for NAND in the PC market and likely by increasing NAND densities on smartphones and tablets besides. For years, the PC manufacture has continued to prefer conventional spinning hard drives for most products, with some systems available with hybrid enshroud drives that combine a small corporeality of NAND flash with a regular spinning deejay. Microsoft'south Surface Studio, for case, uses this choice. The crunch is expected to be relatively short term, equally need for PC laptops will cyclically turn down afterwards Q4, and more manufacturers will have 3D NAND manufacturing online by this time next twelvemonth.