Now is the perfect time to buy an SSD
Nowadays, you rarely see a PC without an SSD. Once an expensive luxury, the prices of solid state drives (SSD) have slowly been decreasing, making them even more accessible to everyone from PC newbies to enthusiasts. Over the last year, SSD prices have been decreasing even more. According to TrendForce, an industry analyst firm, these prices will continue to drop throughout 2020 and possibly into 2021 as well
Storage Newsletter, a platform that keeps a track of advancements in Storage, also wrote an article explaining that the average price for NAND flash would drop by another 10% over the remainder of the year. But that’s not all, they also stated that prices would further drop another 15% in the first quarter of 2021.
What’s With SSD Price Drops?Well, the simple and short answer is supply and demand. More specifically, supply and demand of NAND Flash. The NAND Flash is the primary component of an SSD and is what we store our data on. The price fluctuation we see is the result of a high amount of inventory caused by high amounts of NAND wafer production.  In case you didn’t know, NAND Flash chips are cut from large 300mm wafers as seen above. A high amount of wafer production has led to a surplus in NAND chips (Image Credits: iTers News) Essentially, there’s a high amount of NAND Flash and not enough demand for it. Added to that, the demand for SSDs is declining in the server market as well. Taking all these into account, we’re likely to see a 10% drop in average prices in Q4 of 2020. For 2021, this will accelerate another 15% as NAND flash supplies become more abundant.
 Get yourself an SSD and say goodbye to loading screens (Image Credits: Neowin) What does this mean for the average Joe? Well, if you want to purchase an SSD, there’s no time like the present to do so. High-capacity NVMe SSDs have become a lot cheaper, almost to the point where they’re trading blows with regular SATA SSDs. The fun part is that an NVMe SSD is ridiculously faster than a regular SATA SSD which in turn is significantly faster than a regular SATA3 Hard drive. So basically, we are living in a time where you can get a large capacity SSD for ridiculous prices, and have our OS and Apps running and even have space for games. This in turn means that games load a lot faster than before, almost eliminating loading screens. | |