Today, no one considers buying a desktop or laptop computer that does not have a solid state storage drive. The reason is that they have a very positive impact on performance and consumption is lower. According to the latest TrendForce report, the SSD sales are down 25%despite being better priced than ever.
We are not going to discover now that SSDs are, in general, much better than HDDs. Mechanical hard drives simply stand out for having much higher capacity. This makes them perfect for mass data storage, since solid state hard drives are very limited in capacity.
Brutal drop in sales
The TrendForce report is truly spectacular and gives a lot of information. What draws a lot of attention is the general collapse in the sale of SSDs, which falls without precedent. Just at a time when practically all ssd of the market of 1TB They are for under 100 euros.
According to the report, from this market analysis firm, the sales during in the Q4 2022 they have fallen a 5.3% with respect to Q3 2022. But the most beastly data is found if we compare two different years. We see how the sale of ssd in it Q4 2022 ha fallen a 25% with respect to Q4 2021.
Going into detail, who falls the most in sales is Micronwho suffers a 34.7% drop yoy Kioxia and SK Group (SK Hynix and Solidgram) fall something more than 30% yoy Somewhat better are the data from samsungwhich only suffers a decrease of 19%. Who is in better situation is Western Digitalwhich only suffers one 3.8% drop.
We have to emphasize that the report talks about NAND Flash memories, but come on, in the end it is the main component of SSDs. This tells us that these storage units are not being sold.
Note that memory manufacturers have reduced production to stabilize the price of SSDs. Currently, there is an excess supply that will not last long. After this period, it is normal for the price of this type of hard drive to rise.
Why aren’t SSDs being sold?
There is no single and clear reason, it is simply a conjunction or combination of elements. Perhaps the most important is the drop in PC sales, both desktop and laptop. As fewer systems are sold after the pandemic, the sale of storage units falls.
It coincides, on the other hand, that upgrading the computer is increasingly expensive. The price of graphics cards, motherboards and processors has risen and, consequently, buying a new computer is expensive and not very accessible.
Also, SSDs as the main storage drive is great, it improves system performance a lot. But the limited capacity makes them little or nothing interesting for mass storage. It only makes sense for cases in which the user requires high transfer speeds for working with large files, such as photo and/or video editing.
The technical limit of SSDs at 4 TB in the case of M.2, as is normal, is affecting them negatively. A 10 TB HDD costs about 180 euros (depending on the model) but a 4 TB solid state hard drive costs more than 450 euros. We are talking about double the capacity for less than half the price.
