Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Industry-wide supply issues could raise HDD pricing by as much as 10%, potentially more for NAND
Following last year's reports of a "potential" NAND shortage, and with the recent Taiwan Earthquake further disrupting the tech industry's supply chain, Western Digital has officially informed its partners that it will "continue to implement price increases on flash and hard drive products this quarter." These increases started on April 8th [h/t Trendforce, original source TechNews.TW].
[...] Scott Davis, Senior VP of WD's Channel and Regional OEM Sales, likely sent this notification to direct business partners. However, it's certainly just as important for consumers moving into 2024. Higher-than-expected demand combined with supply constraints have pushed us out of the era of dirt-cheap storage now, as was rumored last fall. Hopefully, the increased prices won't last too long.
TW's sources point toward HDD pricing increasing by as much as 10%, with a minimum 5% pricing increase expected. There are no hard numbers for NAND flash pricing, but NAND prices were already heading up and we expect further pricing increases could be in line with HDDs, if not worse.
Trendforce's coverage points to its own Q3 2023 revenue data, where WD is the third-largest NAND flash manufacturer, with Samsung and SK hynix taking the top two spots. Phison's CEO warned back in March that the ever-rising prices of SSDs could "hobble NAND flash industry with reduced demand." That doesn't seem to be the case for now, but it will take time for the effects of the price increases to propagate through the chain.
Last year saw prices on the best SSDs fall to under $100 for decent quality 2TB M.2 PCIe 4.0 models, with even higher-end options like the WD Black SN850X and Samsung 990 Pro falling below $125. Currently, the WD Black SN850X 2TB costs $156 while the Samsung 990 Pro 2TB costs $176. Larger 4TB drives were going for as little as $160, compared to today's $209 for the Silicon Power UD90 4TB.
(Score: 5, Touché) by epitaxial on Wednesday April 10 2024, @05:56PM (1 child)
Storage prices have been too low for too long. We can't have that now.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Spamalope on Thursday April 11 2024, @04:39AM
With all the DRAM price fixing scandals, I'm sure the same players would never, ever price fix solid state memory. I mean, it's completely different and they'd never be tempted right? (no idea, but it does make me wonder...)
(Score: 5, Informative) by Whoever on Wednesday April 10 2024, @06:11PM (3 children)
With all the issues about total data loss of the Sandisk external SSDs, and the denials from WD, I am at a loss as to why anyone would buy an SSD from WD at this time.
There were so many articles last year promoting how cheap these drives were after the data loss came to light, but these articles failed to mention the data loss. Where is the truth in reporting these days?
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/sandisk-ssd-firmware-fix-fails-hardware-havoc-revealed/ [digitaltrends.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by epitaxial on Wednesday April 10 2024, @06:35PM (2 children)
For desktops I use Samsung drives. My reasoning is that they are the chip manufacturers. On servers and devices that don't need a lot of storage I buy used Intel enterprise ssds because they're dirt cheap and never have large write numbers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Whoever on Wednesday April 10 2024, @07:16PM
I am with you on that. For work, we buy Samsung SSDs and we do have to monitor them for wear out and replace them occasionally, as the remaining life gets too low. I don't think we have ever had a premature failure with Samsung, but other manufacturers have let us down.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by stormreaver on Thursday April 11 2024, @01:50PM
Samsung has been hit or miss for me. My first Samsung 1TB SSD has worked fine for the first year, but the second Samsung SSD completely died after about a month of light use. I have built four desktops with Silicon Power SSD's in the last three months, and they are all working well at a significantly lower cost.
So Samsung has had a 50% success rate for me, and Silicon Power has had a 100% success rate for me (so far). We'll see how long the SP's last to see if I made the right call.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Ingar on Thursday April 11 2024, @10:06AM
It is almost as if these price-increasing earthquakes are becoming an annual event. I had planned to upgrade my main data RAID array this year
and 1TB or 2TB drives definitely won't do.
Understanding is a three-edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth.