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NAND flash

For the final few years, SDD prices have been falling steadily, thanks to increased NAND production by multiple companies and the transition to 3D NAND, which offers vastly increased densities for lower cost-per-bit. That trend is expected to have a hitting in December, with significant price increases expected for Q4. If yous're planning to purchase an SSD for Christmas, in other words, you might desire to do so now.

Co-ordinate to DRAMeXchange via CTimes, average contract prices for MLC NAND wink drives are expected to rise by six-10% , while TLC products are predictable to rise by 6-9%. MLC, or multi-level jail cell NAND stores 2 bits of data per jail cell, while triple-level cell (TLC) drives can shop three bits of data per prison cell. TLC drives tend to be cheaper than their MLC equivalents for this reason, though the lower cost as well comes with some drawbacks. TLC drives by and large have a much lower number of plan/erase cycles and significantly lower write speeds (there'southward a read speed gap every bit well, but information technology tends to be much smaller). It should besides be noted that the P/E bike penalty for TLC NAND is really only a problem for traditional planar NAND — Samsung's 3D TLC NAND can manage more than 20K program-erase cycles, which is actually higher than nearly planar MLC memory. We explain the departure between 3D and traditional NAND hither, 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, y'all tin find that data here.

"The price gap of 128GB and 256GB SSDs versus 500 GB and 1TB HDDs grew larger than expected in the second half of 2022 due to the sharp rise in SSD prices," Alan Chen, senior enquiry manager of DRAMeXchange, told CTimes. "Nonetheless, SSD demand in the PC-OEM market is gaining stiff momentum as 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 estimation. "Irrespective of the undersupply situation in the NAND Wink market, the SSD adoption rate in the global notebook market is certain to pass 30% this year. Furthermore, this figure is expected to be above 50% former within the 2022~2018 catamenia."

Gartner_Inflection_Point

As SSD prices drop, more companies are using them in place of difficult drives. Data past Gartner, April 2022.

Increased prices mean increased revenue, and Samsung is expected to be the large winner here, with a 20% 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 engineering already. For now, Western Digital is focusing more on retention 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 too. For years, the PC industry has continued to prefer conventional spinning hard drives for most products, with some systems available with hybrid cache drives that combine a pocket-size corporeality of NAND flash with a regular spinning disk. Microsoft's Surface Studio, for example, uses this option. The crisis is expected to be relatively brusque term, as need for PC laptops volition cyclically decline after Q4, and more than manufacturers will have 3D NAND manufacturing online past this time adjacent year.