SSDs are about to get a lot cheaper, reports suggest
Whilst there's no denying SSDs have become far more commonplace over the last decade or so (SSD Data Recovery is a search term that regularly leads people to our website) they're still not quite as ubiquitous as initially expected.
This, though, could be about to change: the price of solid state drives (SSDs) are set to fall significantly in the latter half of 2018, a market research firm has claimed.
DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, have precited that
the cost of NAND Flash will fall by 10 per cent in successive quarters in the
second half of 2018. Historically, the opposite has been true with prices
driven up by manufacturers purchasing cells in preparation for the Christmas
rush – but this trend is unlikely to continue in 2018.
Demand for SSDs has been considerably less pronounced than
expected, with experts attributing this to flatlining smartphones sales and that
strong netbooks sales figures posted in the first half of 2018 increase the
likelihood of a slump in sales around the festive period.
Additionally, with manufacturers having honed their
production techniques, the cost of making NAND chips has fallen considerably.
Manufacturers have also significantly upped their production forecasts as a
result.
Finally, perhaps the most important factor at play is the
abundance of companies now manufacturing and marketing SSDs leading to oversupply
in a market where demand is expected to fall considerably.
DRAMeXhange expect the trend to continue long into 2019,
too. The company have predicted that prices will shrink further in the first
half of the year, noting that the cost of SSDs have traditionally fallen during
this period for several years; something often credited to a lull in sales
following Christmas.
Does this mean you
should upgrade to an SSD?
Whilst falling prices may make the prospect of a new SSD
tempting, it’s still worth remembering that the benefit of increased speed is
tempered by lower storage densities. If you therefore have a lot of data to
store or predict that you’re going to need to scale up your storage capacity in
the near future, we’d suggest sticking with a HDD for now.
Also, whilst the increased speeds are noticeable when
booting up devices or accessing large files such as games or videos, the
improved performance is barely noticeable with smaller files such as
spreadsheets and word documents.
So, unless you intend to store a relatively small amount of
data and regularly access very large files (which is, of course, contradictory)
we’d recommend you choose an HDD over an SSD.
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