How low is the price of SSDs, when you consider storing all SSDs?
The SMR shingled technology with exchanging cost to performance is accelerating into the products with mechanical hard disk, but the price never changes. If the price is reasonable, will you consider that change all mechanical hard disks into SSD and not just use in the system disks?
By the technology of die shrink and 3D stacking, the cost of flash memory manufacturing decreases all the time. The SATA of entry-level SSDs with the price of 1RMB per GB are expensive, but the SSD capacity of unit GB is far bigger than the mechanical hard disk. Do you think how much is the gap of them, you will consider all SSDs storage.
Not only domestic users but also the enterprise storage face the same problem. Aaron Rakers, the analyst of Wells Fargo, believes that enterprise storage tends to choose SSD, when SSD’s price of unit capacity falls to the five times of mechanical hard disk or less. The SSD not only has better performance, but also has lower requirement for electricity and heat dissipation. According to some statistics, by the second quarter of 2019, this cost rate has fallen to around 9 times from 40 times of last year.
In the field of domestic hard disks, the rate is lower in fact. According to PCEVA, the price of SSD with SATA interface of 2TB capacity is below 2000RMB. While the price of mechanical hard disk with same capacity maintain in 389RMB. The price gap of unit GB capacity is about 5.1 times.
Despite the continued friction between Japan and Korea, the industry think that the price rebound of NAND flash memory is hard to sustain for the weak demand recovery. Samsung will start to operate the second production line in the NAND flash memory manufacturers of Xian in the half of next year. Toshiba will exchange the production line of 2D NAND flash memory into 3D flash memory. Japan's NAND flash memory factory is expected to go into operation in the fourth quarter of next year. SK Hynix prepares to expand the factory which professionally produces M15 of NAND flash memory. The Yangtze Memory begin to support flash memory for the market. The situation of overcapacity will not change in the short term. And for consumers, this means that SSDs have room for further price reduction.