You'll be paying much more for SSD cards this year - here's why

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Thanks to skyrocketing TLC NAND costs (up 120% in two years), you can expect the price of SSD and HDD cards to increase dramatically as well, which means pain at the register when buying new technology.

TLC (Triple-level cell) is a type of NAND flash memory for SSD and HDDs that, as reported by Wccftech, has reached $25.5 per unit for 256GB and $48.5 per unit for 512GB in terms of wholesale market pricing. Coupled with decreasing product demand it creates a scenario where companies need to dramatically increase NAND flash prices as an answer.

A report from Economic Daily News states that manufacturers would need to raise prices by 40% and for manufacturers to retain profitability, future price hikes will need to be at least 50%. Due to this, manufacturers like Phison & Western Digital have already raised NAND flash prices by a massive 55% over consecutive quarters.

SSD card development could seriously be hampered

This spike in SSD pricing comes at a time when we’re seeing some serious advancements in speed and memory size. Two exemplars are Micron's 3500 1TB SSD, which offers sequential reads and writes of up to 7,000 MB/s and 6,900 MB/s respectively, and the possibility of Samsung’s Petabyte SSD.

In other words, we could be seeing some of the best SSDs on the market coming in 2024 and beyond but that progress could be hampered by these anticipated price hikes. And considering that this new tech would have already been pricier, the possible new MSRP could be way too high for many customers to afford.

In that case, it may be a good idea to avoid any of the brand-new SSD cards altogether if you can’t afford to invest right now, and instead purchase the best cheap SSD deals. Most consumers don’t need the memory and speed and even among professionals, it’s not a requirement.

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Named by the CTA as a CES 2023 Media Trailblazer, Allisa is a Computing Staff Writer who covers breaking news and rumors in the computing industry, as well as reviews, hands-on previews, featured articles, and the latest deals and trends. In her spare time you can find her chatting it up on her two podcasts, Megaten Marathon and Combo Chain, as well as playing any JRPGs she can get her hands on.