About 4-5 years ago there was already an important case of apparent manipulation of the price of RAM memory. The price doubled in less than a year, for reasons that were never entirely clear. The European Union or the United States did nothing and China investigated it (supposedly) and no more was known about it.
A dangerous oligopoly
The computer hardware industry is fairly small, at least in key components. We have two manufacturers of processors and three manufacturers (two and a quarter, to be realistic) of graphics cards. Within these segments, the competition is ruthless, something that does not happen in other segments.
SK Hynix just announced a cutout in the production of memories for the ssd. The reason: they expect sales to continue to drop significantly during the second half of the year. It should be noted that the company has had heavy losses for two consecutive quarters, losing over 60% of revenues. We want to highlight that SK Hynix markets its SSDs under its Crucial brand
Anyone can go to Amazon and see how the 1TB SSD priceswhich move between 50-90 euro. Something similar happens with RAM memory, where we find 32 GB kits below 100 euros. Prices that before the pandemic were totally utopian.
To give us an idea, currently there are losses in the sales of these memories. They are sold below cost in some cases, which is unfeasible. This forces a cut in production that generates an immediate price rise.
Highlight that SK Hynix, Micron, Westen Digital, Samsung and Kioxia (former Toshiba) they have cut their production of memories for SSD. These are the leading manufacturers of solid storage units. So in the coming months we should see price increases or, at the very least, a slowdown in price declines.
Something that you should highlight is that a company, in the end, is designed to make money. It is understandable that they do not want to make a loss or sell their products at a loss. We must say that it is one thing to make money and another to manipulate the market to get rich like beasts, as they would have done in the past.
Many problems and open fronts
Really, the price is only one of the problems that currently exist with SSDs. This market faces different setbacks and some oversights, so to speak.
The first thing is that it has forgotten about the SATA interface, betting everything on the PCIe connection interface. A storage unit connection system that has a big problem. As it is currently designed, it limits the capacity of SSDs and their performance. Due to the small dimensions of the M.2, breaking the 4TB barrier is almost impossible.
Also, we ran into the issue of drives based on PCIe 5.0. SSDs based on this interface have a big temperature problem, forcing a fan to be integrated into the heatsink. As if that were not enough, they are months behind the initially expected launch (Q3-Q4 2022)
A rather complicated situation of which we do not know how it will end.
