TECH NEWS – As NAND chip makers ramp up production, stores may soon be able to charge less for, say, an NVMe SSD if you need more (and/or faster) storage.

A South Korean publication, Chosun Daily, reported that NAND chip manufacturers have increased production.This means that the price hikes of the past few months will soon be over.Samsung Electronic and SK Hynix (two South Korean manufacturers) and Kioxia (Japan) have also decided to do the same. At the end of 2022 and in 2023, South Korean manufacturers will cut production by about 30% to push up prices, but WD and Micron have responded with a more severe 50% cut.

However, inventories have been running low lately due to production cuts and a surge in demand from data centers specializing in artificial intelligence, so it’s no wonder companies are starting to produce again. And as more NAND flash chips become available (they’re needed for SSDs), there will be more pressure on prices to come down: “With the exception of high-capacity NAND used in AI data centers, it is difficult to say that the entire NAND market is recovering.The sudden increase in production is likely to bring down NAND prices, which have been rising,” said Kim Yang-peng, a researcher at the Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade.

However, consumer prices have not come down that much, but you could see that you really had to pay more for them (and it also depends on whether you choose the higher-quality model with DRAM cache or the cheaper version without) than you did, say, half a year ago.To take a US example, Western Digital’s WD Black SN850X SSD in the 2TB version was launched in the second half of 2022 for $280. This briefly dropped to $90 (!!!) last summer, then went back up to $120, and is now around $150.So there has been a price increase of almost 70% from the low point…

In any case, more and faster hosting at a cheaper price never hurts. After all, the sizes of the games are getting ridiculously big…

Source: PCGamer, Chosun Daily