3D NAND

[tdatascraping]

I'm curious to hear people's opinions on what changes to the solid state storage market.

I was looking online at commodity prices of raw chips for ssds and it is looking to me like the implications of 3D may not be fully priced in.

 

Looking at this:https://www.trendforce.com/price/flash

it is looking like a between 8-9X improvement on price per capacity.

 

 

I'm aware of the performance speed differences but I was curious to hear thoughts on this.

Am I misinterpreting this information?

Is this source roughly in line with everyone's expectations for it?

Are ultra high capacity consumer ssds looking like a possibility to other people?

 

I've also noticed that the gross margins of ssds have completely gone away due to competition. Is this because the first to market with denser storage were the cheaper manufacturers which resulted in many incumbents taking a loss on their existing unsold inventory (potentially a transient thing) or are these unhealthy margins hear to stay?

 

Curious if someone with expertise in this area wanted to weigh in and provide their insights with regard to this.

Thanks

[NobleGamer]

7 hours ago, tdatascraping said:

I'm curious to hear people's opinions on what changes to the solid state storage market.

I was looking online at commodity prices of raw chips for ssds and it is looking to me like the implications of 3D may not be fully priced in.

 

Am I misinterpreting this information?

Is this source roughly in line with everyone's expectations for it?

Are ultra high capacity consumer ssds looking like a possibility to other people?

 

I've also noticed that the gross margins of ssds have completely gone away due to competition. Is this because the first to market with denser storage were the cheaper manufacturers which resulted in many incumbents taking a loss on their existing unsold inventory (potentially a transient thing) or are these unhealthy margins hear to stay?

 

Curious if someone with expertise in this area wanted to weigh in and provide their insights with regard to this.

Thanks

I'm no expert on 3D NAND, but I read tech news and Wall Street Journal.  Big picture, I think this is all very simple:

 

The biggest NAND makers overproduced because of the COVID hardware boom, and now they're stuck with inventory and taking huge revenue losses - See Samsung and SK Hynix's latest quarterly reports. Prices will normalize whenever supply normalizes.

 

Another question is whether innovation will cancel out any price increase from inventory stabilization. I personally doubt it because I haven't heard of much huge innovations meaningful to consumers beyond pcie 5, but that's just me.

 

Ultra high capacity (4-8GB) for consumers isnt anywhere near closing the gap with HDD prices for the same size since 4-8 TB+ has a more expensive price per Gig than lower sizes.

[NewMaxx]

I cover this type of news/analysis on my sub-reddit as experts weigh in. There's a decent article from Storage Newsletter on the subject recently. We also have a few industry players in our discord which includes some nervousness from SK hynix/Solidigm with how competitive the pricing has become.

[tdatascraping]

Thanks for the replies, I appreciate the input.

1) Yep, I haven't heard too much about density innovation on the horizon but I am struggling to make sense of some of the prices that I am seeing on dramexchange.

 

2) Followed the subreddit with your name, look forwards to seeing what news y'all post.

 

[NewMaxx]

I recently posted this article to give a quick example, for something more in-depth I'd check out this one which has a Part Two. If you want to understand the technology trends for 3D NAND, look up Jeongdong Choe from TechInsights. Looks like he'll be at FMS 2023 and is covering this topic on August 8th. (scroll down to 3D NAND Process Technology: 2023 and Beyond)