According to industry analyst firm TrendForce, coming via the Storage Newsletter, the memory market (including DRAM and NAND flash) is still in a state of oversupply till Q4 2020, and SSD prices could drop significantly soon by the end of this year.
Storage Newsletter cites that the average price for NAND flash memory will drop another 10% by end of this year i.e. Q4 2020 (average selling price-ASP), and then decrease 15% more in the first quarter of 2021. This has been caused due to the imbalance between supply and demand, and also because of the high amounts of inventory/chip stocks, and large NAND wafer production.
The demand for SSDs has also declined in the server and enterprise market.
Apart from that, Huawei has not being able to buy foreign NAND due to US sanctions, and other clients have already stocked up on NAND so they have high inventory levels.
Soon we can expect high-capacity NVMe SSDs to become incredibly cheaper than before. This is great news for those gamers and customers looking to buy a new SSD, given that solid-state drives are slowly becoming part of the recommended system spec for some games like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and even other PC titles like World of Warcraft: Shadowlands, and Marvel’s Avengers (110 GB SSD space recommended) etc.
SSDs are fantastic because they’re blisteringly fast as compared to conventional hard drives. But that performance comes at a price, literally. But recently SSDs have already reached very competitive levels of pricing. We can sometimes find 1TB NVMe SSD for almost as low as $100 on a good sale.
Recently, Western Digital announced its first M.2 SSD based on PCI Express 4.0 interface of the WD Black gaming line: SN850. The device promises speeds of up to 7GB / s, 1 million IOPS and is sold in denominations of 500GB, 1TB and 2TB. Like the previous SN750, the unit is initially available without a heatsink, while a new version will arrive in the first quarter of next year with a heat sink and RGB LEDs.
In addition, Crucial recently expanded its P2 SSD range with new, higher capacity models. In fact, the low-end unit series has gained the 1TB and 2TB models, offering gamers a good compromise between good speed, high capacity and low price.
“With regards to DRAM, the market is primarily concerned with the mobile DRAM and server DRAM categories, which account for the majority of DRAM bit consumption. In terms of mobile DRAM, the preemptive inventory pull by Huawei has quickly alleviated the three major DRAM suppliers’ pressure to destock their inventories.
With regards to NAND flash, although preemptive stock-up demand from branded clients similarly provided some support for NAND flash ASP, the high level of supply bits and high customer inventory levels at the moment have led to an oversupply situation that is more evident than in the DRAM market.
Owing to aggressive NAND flash demand from Chinese smartphone brands, the decline in eMMC and UFS ASP is expected to narrow to a 3-7% Q/Q drop in 4Q20. Likewise, the continually rising supply of NAND flash wafers will likely result in a nearly 20% Q/Q decline in wafer ASP.
As for SSD, owing to weakening demand from server manufacturers, enterprise SSD ASP is expected to drop by 10-15% Q/Q. Overall NAND flash ASP is projected to drop by about 10% in 4Q20.” via the Storage Newsletter.
Stay tuned for more!
Hello, my name is NICK Richardson. I’m an avid PC and tech fan since the good old days of RIVA TNT2, and 3DFX interactive “Voodoo” gaming cards. I love playing mostly First-person shooters, and I’m a die-hard fan of this FPS genre, since the good ‘old Doom and Wolfenstein days.
MUSIC has always been my passion/roots, but I started gaming “casually” when I was young on Nvidia’s GeForce3 series of cards. I’m by no means an avid or a hardcore gamer though, but I just love stuff related to the PC, Games, and technology in general. I’ve been involved with many indie Metal bands worldwide, and have helped them promote their albums in record labels. I’m a very broad-minded down to earth guy. MUSIC is my inner expression, and soul.
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Cool. I plan to use a 4 TB SSD in my next build a year or two from now. I’ve never had a rig that didn’t use a HDD for games before.
I only use HDD for P*rn. I have 2 Sabrent Nvme which is 2TB each, 1 WD Nvme Black which is 2TB & my OS is WD Nvme Black which is 500 GB. I have a draw full off of WD Reds that are just for movies and p*rn. ?
The low storage of SSDs is what bothers me the most….. only 1-2TB, it was avaliable for HDDs more than 10 years ago. With bunch of games for emuation, older games, newest games and all the other stuff, 2TB is way toooo low. I still need to have multiple 4,6,8,10 TB HDDs and multiple SSDs (when speed is the most improtant thing).
You could also try FuzeDrive/StoreMI or Primocache…… basically, you fuze your fast SSD/nVME with big sized HDD. Best from both worlds…… maybe the best is the 1st solution, basically you have storage (like more than 10 TB), you have speed and the costs are “balanced”.
Damn, thanks for this about drive fuzing, I’m gonna have to look into this. That’s what I’m talking about man. Good info. ?
In short the company Enmotus is behind the FuzeDrive AI solution and AMD is allowed to use their tech, AMD names it StoreMI.
Now, there is an ongoing campaing on Indiegoog on FuzeDrive SSD (their own very first in the world AI SSD), in short, the SSD have both SLC and QLC on one single nVME SSD and its controlled by AI
BTW you can use regular SSDs and “normal” nVME SSDs if you dont want to buy their own “SLC/QLC nVME SSD”
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/fuzedrive-ssd-the-first-ai-powered-nvme-ssd#/
Are SSDs without a dram cache worth only for games?
No please do not buy them.
They are terrible for performance
They start off great and quickly drop to speeds BELOW even typical 7200RPM hard drives.
Better to just get a small SSD and a HD until you can get a big SSD.
I have Transcend TS240GSSD220S 240GB SSD. does it Dram cache? any way to find out?
Yes your SSD does have DDR3 cache just looked it up
“Transcend’s SSD220 is equipped with a DDR3 DRAM cache that provides an incredible 4K random read and write performance of up to 330MB/s”
For the model number TS240GSSD220S
To add more most SSD’s do indeed have cache built into them its the extremely cheap ones that don’t typically the no brand name ones i basically knew yours did just from the brand name alone.
Well in most cases access times is really the main improvement for most people and any SSD will be massively better then hard drives for that.
But for content creation or copying lots of files i wouldn’t recommend them
https://www.tweaktown.com/images/content/9/3/9392_13_crucial-bx500-2tb-sata-ssd-review.png
I still have some old 128GB SSD’s that work great have them in cheap family laptops but they where the samsung ones.
I wouldn’t say 10-15% is “a lot”
To be fair, when you get to the more expensive, higher capacity drives a 10-15% discount is very welcome.
Yeah those 4 TB drives are stupid expensive. You’re looking at 1k$
The worst 8TB SATA SSD is around 800 bucks, imagine how expensive is an 8 – 12 TB nVME (SLC or MLC).
Haha, yes man. I don’t even want imagine a 8-12 TB nVME. homie, I really don’t. My wallet can’t take that type of dreaming. ?
Well it is.
The more expensive it is, the more drop you will see……. but honestly I dont expect those 600 -1200 USD nVMEs to drop in price by 10-20%, highly doubt.
Yea, same here. Its a pale in comparison discount to be sure.
Well at least ram and SSD prices are decent during this virus.
To bad we have no Ryzen stock or RTX stock until next year.
They better. Consoles packing NVME SSDs mean PC gaming will have to catch up because right now very few PC gamers have drives as fast as the Series X let alone PS5.
It doesn’t matter if the PC has faster drives, as we don’t have the technology to bypass the CPU/bottleneck that currently exists. Sata SSD vs NVMe speed difference is currently a very small. We have to wait for DX12 Ultimate before we can really utilize their speed. The consoles beat the PC to this one.
Pretty sure NVMe is around 6x faster than SATA. Most SATA-6 based SSD’s have a top seq r/w of 500 MB/s while NVMe has around 3000 MB/s. And that’s from benchmarks *on* PC with all the bottlenecks PC’s have.
In theory sure. Just look up gaming benchmarks comparing the two though. It gets you nowhere. The software just chucks everything through the CPU which bottlenecks it. You can look it up.
Hmm so I looked it up (video by NCIX benchmarking games with sata and NVMe) and you are correct. It’s indeed the case that NVMe doesn’t offer a benefit in game loading because the bottleneck isn’t the storage speed (and also games don’t utilize file IO that much.
This also seems to align with what NVIDIA announced this year regarding RTX IO, which offloads CPU work for file IO to the GPU. I think in use cases where RTX IO and DirectX DirectStorage is enabled, we’ll see a much bigger performance gap between SATA and NVMe.
In theory yes. But like I said the CPU bottlenecks them with gaming. Modern CPU just can’t route the information fast enough. Just look at real world gaming load times comparing them.
This explains it.
https://youtu.be/zXV3jrwkv0I
Is this a reply to my earlier comment? Because I already acknowledged the CPU bottleneck. Which is why RTX IO offloads it to the GPU, massively reducing that bottleneck.
Linus for example also made comparisons with HDD, SATA SSD, nVME etc.on the same PCs (multiple) and people couldnt tell the difference.
Yep, which is why you need something like RTX IO or Direct Storage to utilize it.
Theory….. but most released games dont (still) use the true potential of 3000 – 8000 MB/s NVMes or Optane memory.
What CPU bottleneck are you talking about? The fault is on the software side. Do you think inserting a PS4 game will magically use the PS5’s faster storage capabilities? No, the devs have to optimize that game and games that they will make for PS5/XBox so it can use the SSD’s capabilities. And, how do you think we get the real time speeds of fast SSDs on PC? It’s because the software used in benchmarking those SSDs “can” make the SSDs run to their max speed unlike games made right now
You’re not wrong. But, I’m also not wrong. That’s also how DS12 U fixes it, via software. BUT, it will require certain GPUs to be able to run it.
You can look up “why NVMe’s aren’t faster in games” and find a lot of resources.
This stupid site won’t let me post any link with facts in it.
Its not just “software”….
You didn’t read the whole comment or what?
Sorry…. MS said something like (not directly) that some specific PCI-e 4.0 nVME SSDs will support the DirectStorage…… not all PCI-e 4.0 nVME SSDs.
It was said it will….. its like moving you PC game from HDD to SSD (just by doing that, nothing else) you will get much better loading times. Now, less texture poppins, better draw distance and simiar could improve with SSD/nVME but they need to patch the currently released games or update the engines for that….
You think consoles have some magical tech in them?
PCIe NVMe SSD’s have been on the PC market for years now.
“They do” because its still not avaliable for PC…… SSDs/nVME on PCs still cant talk directly to GPU/VRAM.
I was referring to hardware. And PC’s can do that now with RTX IO and DirectStorage.
jeez would you please stop. no we cant do it “now” as it does not even exist yet. its going to be early next year before Microsoft even starts working on directstorage in beta and likely the very end of next year at the earliest before its ready to even have RTX IO be utilized for regular consumers. and then it will be down to the game dev to design a game to utilize it. FFS you are probably talking about at least 2.5 to 3 years before it becomes the norm for games.
They said developers would get it somehwere in 2021 which basically means, games would use it in 2022 in best case scenario…… considering its MS, it sure wont happen so fast.
Its there “only nVidia GPUS” but its pointless and would be pointless for some long time. And where is your data/assets stored? Its on either HDD or SSD/nVME SSDs. Microsoft said that DirectSotrage will arrive in 2021/22…. its not avaliable, it even seems that not all PCI-e 4.0 nVME SSDs will support it. Most games still dont use SLI and even if they do, the scaling is not the best in some games, most games dont use ray tracing and most games dont use DLSS and so on. My main point is, the adoptation of newer tech on PC is not happening actually that fast…..
Good i am looking to upgrade my 8 years old HDD
I have Transcend TS240GSSD220S 240GB SSD. does it Dram cache?
a simple google search says yes
Yeah Nvme’s are costly but they are around the same price as SSD’s now, So I Stopped buying SSD’s and have only Nvme’s in my system. It’s too bad Nvme’s doesn’t matter for gaming. Such a damn shame!
My system:
2TB Sabrent | GoG
2TB Sabrent | Steam
2TB WD Black | Other Launchers
500GB WD Black | OS
1TB 2x500GB Samsung Evo In Raid 0 | Piracy
If my OS drive Fooks I just swap it out and keep on going no need to reinstall my games or anything. Everything is well organised on Seperate drives. So I guess 15% off could help because that’s A LOT of money I spent for sure.
“Other Launchers”…Sure,sure…. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/603e0cfa88d9870c0db13171764a719bba6b2531bf08c2023ef3bb452756b076.gif
I didn’t want to drop a ton of cash on gen 4 nvme yet since they aren’t even as good as they can and will be soon. I did snag a 1tb Sabrent gen 4 drive though and I am impressed, the only other nvme drive I have is 2tb intel 600p I bought years ago for under $200.
I have 3x 2tb sata SSD along with two enterprise 4tb HDD as well with room for 3 more sata drives and 1 nvme! Gotta love the x570 Taichi!
I also had my OS on a smaller sata drive but I upgraded it and moved it over to another computer and it was damn near painless. I highly recommend being smart with how you deploy your drives!
Excellent!