SSD prices could drop significantly soon – so don’t buy one yet

Samsung 960 EVO SSD
(Image credit: Future)

SSD prices are set to go even lower as we head towards the end of 2020, according to a new report, with additional price drops potentially happening at the beginning of next year, as well.

The report from Storage Newsletter cites data from TrendForce – an analyst firm with its finger very much on the pulse of the storage (and memory) market – which forecasts a 10% drop in the average selling price (ASP) of NAND flash in Q4 2020, as the market is currently oversupplied.

The estimate for SSDs in Q4 is that with weakening demand from server manufacturers, the ASP of enterprise solid-state drives is expected to drop by 10% to 15%, and presumably we will witness at least some of that downward drift in the consumer market as well.

Furthermore, NAND flash pricing is expected to sink even more in the first quarter of 2021, by 15% in fact (compared to 10% this quarter), and so we may see a knock-on effect and further price reductions for SSDs at the start of next year.

All this is forecasting and educated guesswork at the moment, of course, but it certainly seems that the big picture is only pointing one way – downward movement in pricing for SSDs (and memory to a lesser extent).

Good news for gamers

Obviously this is good news for those looking to upgrade a hard drive to an SSD, and certainly gamers who are feeling the pressure to make the move from an old spinning disk, given that solid-state drives are more commonly becoming part of the recommended spec for some games (like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, to pick a fresh example).

SSDs have already reached very competitive levels of pricing, of course. Indeed, right now you can get a 1TB SSD (TeamGroup GX2) for $80 on Amazon for example, and that’s without a deal (of which we’ll doubtless see plenty come Black Friday next month).

Via Hexus

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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