Just wondering if there is any obvious reason the price of M.2 - SSD's etc has attached itself to a rocket in recent months?
All of a sudden a Samsung 990 Pro 2TB M.2 is $389 - camel's has it at 245.00 (Oct 05, 2023)
Is it just because they can?
Why The Price Increase in SSD's Recently?
pharkurnell on 07/05/2024 - 14:47
Comments
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ssds/ssd-prices-p…
SSD prices predicted to skyrocket throughout 2024 — TrendForce market report projects a 50% price hike
Was predicted 6 months ago, surprised it took this long, frankly
Because NAND was massively overproduced the last few years when he factories came online. They were almost giving the chips away.
Now we're settling back into a new normal.
^^This is the real reason.
Everyone and his dog saw there'd be a big demand for NAND, and everyone geared up their factories to produce it rather than any of the other chip types, and there was massive overproduction. There were warehouses full of SSDs.They could only clear that excess stock by selling them off cheap. Below cost of production, so SSDs were cheap. So everyone then decided to switch their plants over to something else to try to make money again, and the warehouses emptied and price went back up to where it is now.
Gearing a semiconductor plant up to produce a particular chip type and generation takes a lot of time and a lot of money, and they have to try to predict what will be required years in advance. Sometimes they get it right. Sometimes they underestimate how well a new generation of processors will sell, and don't gear up to produce enough of the next generation of RAM it requires, so it expensive. Eg, DDR5. Sometimes they get it the other way around.
No-one can charge "whatever they like" for memory products, because its standardised, and the machines that make it are purchased from the same companies so no-one can get far ahead of anyone else, so the people who buy it can just switch to buying from one of their competitors.
Probably AI craze sucking up massive amounts of the same materials and technologies used in consumer SSDs.
Someone has to pay for their kids private schooling
Because they can is the real answer.
Why are GPU prices still sky-high? Because they can.
Why haven't storage prices normalised since the 2011 Thailand floods when storage manufacturers cried wolf about production being affected for the next 10 years (even though it wasn't) and went insane with price-gouging and never, ever lowered the per-GB costs to pre-2011 levels? Because they can.
Every few years there is some contrived "crisis" affecting the global semiconductor/chip manufacturing industry which all of the OEMs use to artificially jack up prices for years to come, whether it's floods in Thailand, an explosion in crypto-mining, demand for mobile computing silicon stealing production/resources away from desktop silicon, Covid-induced impacts affecting production long-after those impacts ceased to be relevant, muh "AI revolution", etc.
They've perfected this cycle to a tee now and the industry and consumers lap it up with a big ol' sh*t-eating grin.
What do you expect with the monopolised nature of the global semiconductor market, both on the vendor side (Intel/AMD/Nvidia) and the fabrication side (Samsung/TSMC/Nvidia/Intel).
Just HODL.
Like all tech items it goes through periods of booms and busts.
Fikwot?!
I noticed this too, was about to purchase a 2nd 2T ssd and the prices nearly doubled.
I was so sure the price would be lower than i spent last year but was shocked. Now im just wondering should i wait or bite the bullet. Its not like i really need one but having empty ssd space in your pocket is such a good feeling :)
Landslide in Taiwan last month prob not helping - Wife called it and said prices for some tech stuff may increase.
collusion and bought and paid for media hype to artificially increase prices
there is zero fundamental reason to increase the price of ssds
hopefully someone with enough clout will jump on them like they did with big RAM
It is an election year in USA.