Why aren’t SSDs getting cheaper?

New, higher capacity drives should help push pricing down, but better fabrication and a bigger production ramp-up are needed. We may not see a change in price until 2011.

Solid-state drives (SSD) have been among the hottest hardware products for more than two years, with a good deal of uptake within the consumer PC, notebook and netbook markets in response to a precipitous drop in pricing in 2007 and 2008.

The fabricators of NAND flash chips, which are used to build SSDs, took a bath for more than a year beginning in 2007, even losing money on the products they sold. Pricing for NAND flash dropped as much as 60% year over year in 2007 and 2008.

“There was a definite oversupply of NAND. The problem was no one was making money in NAND or the memory industry at that point,” says Steve Weinger, director of NAND flash marketing at Samsung, the industry’s largest producer of NAND flash chips.

After the first quarter of 2009, however, SSD pricing leveled off and even increased as the economy forced NAND flash manufacturers to stop investing in new equipment and demand outstripped supply.

Read more: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9175690/Why_aren_t_SSDs_getting_cheaper_?taxonomyName=Storage+Hardware&taxonomyId=149

New, higher capacity drives should help push pricing down, but better fabrication and a bigger production ramp-up are needed. We may not see a change in price until 2011.

Solid-state drives (SSD) have been among the hottest hardware products for more than two years, with a good deal of uptake within the consumer PC, notebook and netbook markets in response to a precipitous drop in pricing in 2007 and 2008.

The fabricators of NAND flash chips, which are used to build SSDs, took a bath for more than a year beginning in 2007, even losing money on the products they sold. Pricing for NAND flash dropped as much as 60% year over year in 2007 and 2008.

“There was a definite oversupply of NAND. The problem was no one was making money in NAND or the memory industry at that point,” says Steve Weinger, director of NAND flash marketing at Samsung, the industry’s largest producer of NAND flash chips.

After the first quarter of 2009, however, SSD pricing leveled off and even increased as the economy forced NAND flash manufacturers to stop investing in new equipment and demand outstripped supply.

Read more: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9175690/Why_aren_t_SSDs_getting_cheaper_?taxonomyName=Storage+Hardware&taxonomyId=149