Just three months ago, the analysts at DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, said an oversupply of NAND flash memory chips was driving SSD suppliers into a "price war." Contract prices were predicted to plunge, resulting in 512GB SSDs replacing 128GB SSDs in the mainstream market. Now, however, the same research firm says that while prices did in fact fall, they may stabilize in the fourth quarter.
"TrendForce's outlook for 4Q gives that prices for some low-capacity products may be adjusted slightly upwards while the rest trend flat. Client SSDs were likewise affected by contract prices formerly agreed upon. Adding that market inventories remained high, 3Q still saw a near-10 percent decline. However, suppliers' inventories are forecast to fall to more healthier levels in 4Q, which will help stabilized prices and stop them from falling," DRAMeXchange says.
Sometimes it feels like analysts are throwing darts at a board of predictions, and then relaying to the public whatever they hit. That is being overly harsh. It is, after all, a tough gig to accurately predict market trends, though changing things up from a price war to stabilized prices in a matter of three months is frustrating, from a consumer perspective.
We maintain a dynamic list of the best SSD deals each week, as well as a roundup of the best SSDs for gaming, based on price, capacity, and performance. You should check both of those out if you are in the market for a storage upgrade.
Generally speaking, you can find a 1TB SSD for $100 or less. Here are a few examples:
- Adata Ultimate SU630 960GB (2.5-inch SATA)—$84.99, Newegg
- Patriot Burst 960GB (2.5-inch SATA)—$89.99, Newegg
- Intel 660p 1TB (NVMe M.2)—$94.99, Amazon
- Crucial BX500 960GB (2.5-inch SATA)—$99.79, Newegg
- Crucial P1 1TB (NVMe M.2)—$99.99, Amazon
One thing that will be interesting to see is if PCIe 4.0 SSDs will ultimately push down pricing of PCIe 3.0 models. So far, the handful of PCIe 4.0 drives that have been announced are high-performance drives that tout rated sequential read speeds of around 5,000MB/s.
That is way more than what is beneficial for gaming, and you need an AMD X570 motherboard paired with a third-gen Ryzen processor to take full advantage of those drives. However, their existence could potentially devalue PCIe 3.0 drives, to an extent. Fingers crossed.
