NAND Prices Should Hold Out Until After September

Though it wasn't as severe as what happened on the DRAM segment, the decline of demand on the NAND Flash market has been more than noticeable during the past few years.

It is a small reprieve that things have calmed down enough for prices to attain a sort of stability. It may not be the best way to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the creation of this memory technology, but it is better than nothing.

According to a report by Digitimes, demand for USB flash drives and memory cards is still slow, but decreased manufacturing capacity for NAND Flash chips in general has staved off the worst of the consequences for now.

Alas, this state of affairs cannot safely continue. While prices will stay at their current level for a time, perhaps until Septembers' end, it will still take a recovery in consumer interest for a real improvement to show.

The completion of 19nm manufacturing lines, if nothing else, should lead to a brief recovery, though most bets are still on the upcoming holiday season.

What all this means is that SSDs, flash drives and flash cards won't get any cheaper for a while, so buying one or two won't be a bad choice at this point in time.

Of course, there are other things that could have an impact on this matter, albeit in the mid to long term, not the least of which is a certain project from Integrated Device Technology, Inc. (IDT).

Long story short, IDT seeks to remove the need for special drivers when using PCI Express solid state drives. A breakthrough here would make NAND Flash quite a bit more convenient for enterprise use. And since each “drive” (PCI Express card) uses many memory chips, high sales volumes could have a major effect on the market of solid state storage as a whole.

Via: NAND Prices Should Hold Out Until After September