You keep raising the prices and I keep not buying.
They are rising from rock bottom, I just bought a 4tb gen 3 nvme for $230 Cad
It’s like gas prices early in the pandemic, but not quite as bad.
They grossly overproduced, sat on a stockpile that couldn’t sell which costs them a ton and had to sell them for nothing. There’s nowhere for the price to go but up.
Keep them there.
Seriously, a lot of weirdly negative comments here.
Yeah, it’s not great that prices go up, but a few months ago was the lowest price for memory and storage we have ever seen in all of history. 40€/TB at the low end for SSDs. That’s absolutely insane. It was entirely expected for prices to rise a bit again.
How fast is it? A lot of m.2’s are cheap because they’re slow.
I bought a WD Black 4TB gen4 nvme for just under $200 over the holidays.
The listing says up to 7,300MB/s. I only have a gen3 SSD slot so I can’t verify that but it saturates the gen3 capabilities.
It is so frustrating trying to buy a nvme ssd because they make it so unclear which models have DDR and which don’t. I tried to buy one recently to upgrade a family member’s computer and was wondering how a non technical person has any chance of finding something decent.
MB/s
Seq 1M Q8T1
1Gb
2838 Read 2255 Write
4Gb
1419 Read 2239 WriteRandom 4k
44.89 Read 108.33 Write
Where?
And then in 5 years they’ll all settle for a few million dollars in a class action for price fixing. Rinse, repeat.
Of course, the customer payout will eventually amount to $5/affected customer, but only those who replied to their rather invasive survey, paid out over 3 payments over the coming year.
Don’t forget it’s usually just US citizens who even get the chance to jump onto such class action suits. The rest of the world don’t even get their $5.
Nobody is buying so let’s increase the price. Makes a lot of sense. Good job guys.
If people generally atent buying, there’s still People that need to buy (businesses, oems, etc)
They’re just doing the ol covid ratchet. Tightening the thumbscrews on the people who can’t opt out.
Doesn’t affect their bottom line much if nobody’s choosing to buy.
Yup, Meta is buying $9 Billion of GPUs but no SSDs. Nope!
They store the fake news in GDDR6X.
They drastically increased production after covid, and then with inflation and the economy slowing down, demand crashed, meaning they had a fuckton of NAND and nobody to sell it to. They needed to get rid of it so they sold it all at a steep discount below the break even mark, losing billions of dollars in the process (I don’t think any NAND manufacturer had a profitable 2023?). Now, they’re cutting back production to profitable levels that actually meet demand, so prices will increase and return to normal.
So, uh, collusive behavior?
It wouldn’t even be the first time for them.
Probably not even the tenth time.
They lost billions of dollars due to production being way higher than demand during 2023, it’s only collusion in the sense that they all want to actually make some money on the NAND they manufacture.
Demand is way down, so they raise prices. This is the cycle that keeps repeating, and nobody should be surprised.
That’s… thats’s not how this works.
It’s exactly how this works, and during a quarterly review with Samsung, they literally told me they were doing this. Nobody in the industry is surprised by this.
Not sure why you’d deny what you literally see happening.
It shouldn’t (edited) matter if the rise the prices. Nobody’s buying, right?
What?
Typo…
Ok. Well, people are buying all the production. But production is down. And they control the price so they raised that too.
Welcome to free market capitalism.
You are free to open a competing fab!
The only claim in this thread that demand is down is from you. When demand is already low, prices going up makes no sense.
This is not to say that someone wouldn’t do it anyways, but then there’s also Erdoğan who lowered interests to “combat inflation” against advice of his central bankers, whom he fired. Then inflation becomes worse and surprised Pikachu face ensues
I have information directly from the three main manufacturers. Demand is down, production is down, so in order to not show losses on the balance sheet prices went up.
TSMC did the same thing last year- raised prices by around 27% for all customers. Because demand is way, WAY down. Sadly their increase wasn’t enough to stave off a drop in revenue.
When you have the whole market cornered, normal supply and demand economics don’t apply.
Do they have a captive audience for those who still have a demand? I can understand “look, if we have to keep the production lines going to provide you with required hardware, of which we are not selling as much as we used to, we have to raise prices” - but if the customers who still buy are flexible, this would only mean even less people buy.
Customers are fairly inflexible. If you need storage or ram for 10k new servers, that’s it. You have to have it. And since all manufacturers raised prices, you’re going to spend more. Making matters worse, if you have to onboard another vendor to safe a few tens of thousands of dollars, you can easily spend hundreds of thousands on time and resources to go through a qualification cycle alone.
Home computers make up a significantly smaller portion of the computer component space. So while this might prevent a person from upgrading their SSD or building a DDR 5 equipped gaming computer, that’s small percentages of sales. A single corporate relationship account will buy thousands of devices at a time, larger accounts will buy tens of hundreds of thousands. A cloud operator building 10k servers with 12 channels of RAM will buy 24 dimms per server. It’s a totally different game.
In principal I would say “fair enough”, except that for cloud operators, the service prices would also probably increase, possibly leading to less end user demand for cloud space. Anyways, your point is well constructed, I concede ;) Although the logic “less customers, therefore let’s raise prices” would drive a lot of vendors into bankrupcy.
They also drastically cut supply.
By cut supply, you mean several fabs have suffered catastrophic losses and turned down production for nearly a year? Because that’s what happened.
And yes, nobody makes products when there’s no demand for them. It’s the basics of how they turn the screws to buyers at all times.
They cut supply in like September. They were all fighting for market share still, largely driven by Samsung, hence the low prices.
Server shipments were way down because everyone overbought in 2021/2022.
The NAND market has always been an antitrust shit show.
Yup. They control the entire market and there’s a decreasing number of fabs. They raise prices to ensure revenue doesn’t drop and they can keep showing investors lines going up.
It’s idiotic, and it’s how the industry has worked for decades at this point. Just wait till people figure out the games played by fabs, substrate manufacturers, and component suppliers…
The main factor is normally panic article like this.
“Hey, the price is going to go up later this year!”
*people buy now*
*demand goes up*
*price goes up*
Well, I saw this coming and got a new 2TB SSD before 11.11 even. Though now thinking if I should have gotten 4TB instead. xD
Also, this kinda is like collusion, no?
Maybe that’s their real play here? Put out a bunch of news about upcoming price hikes, and watch everyone scramble to buy up their current stock.
They’re not even going to make an excuse for it like “the power went off for a split second in one room at one factory
because we flicked a switch”? Regardless, I’m fine with waiting years for them to tire themselves out with all the screaming about how prices must rise. It gives me great pleasure to not reward this behavior while they’re pulling this shit. Raise the prices all you want, I’m not buying.Of course they are because they see line go up.
Oh look, more stuff I just won’t buy if prices go up.
In the US there is enormous investment in new NAND and other chips manufacturing. The government does not want these products and materials to be expensive or scarce. So the good news is the US gov will likely jump on this immediately.
I feel like China enacting protectionist policies on lithium will do more to drive up chip prices. People are broke right now, so choking out the retail supply of chips to artificially raise prices will just result in miserable quarters for Micron, Hynix, and Samsung.
Too late, I was buying up a bunch of high TBW solid state drives the last ~2 years, even this Black Friday/Boxing Day there were a few last deals.
My focus was mostly on Intel Optane leftovers, but also Samsung Pro (NVMe, SATA, even microSD), Kingston enterprise (DC500M/DC600M/DC1500M, NVMe, SD/microSD), even some Seagate Nytro SATA/SAS enterprise drives, Crucial MX500, WD Red, and a bunch of other brands.
I’m a data hoarder organizer for family/relatives/friends I regularly give tech support for and myself. I love to recycle old PC I’ve build previously into NAS, media center, NVR or whatever new projects or ideas they come up with.
Unfortunately, I may have missed out on some great DDR4 and DDR5 deals I saw but was thinking it was not immediately necessary 🫤… oh well… we win some and lose some.
i wouldnt mind to snag a deal on some premium ddr3. but if they raise the price, then nvm. i’ll wait till next year.
What a surprise, capitalists can’t keep making more money quarter after quarter so instead they just rack up the prices for no reason other than the c-suite wants more bonus money.
Fucking PATHETIC and reprehensible
So, price fixing doesn’t exist in communism?
Love how everyone’s argument for capitalism is just ‘well communism sucks too’.
Good job regurgitating half a century’s worth of propaganda, no one mentioned communism and there’s more than just 2 ways to run q society
I was born and have lived in a communist country. It doesn’t “suck too”, it gets you killed. Good job regurgitating garbage tired internet arguments.
Dictators and authoritarianism get you killed. Some capitalist countries have also have these things and, oddly enough, people also die for the same reasons. Could it be… the economic model actually isn’t the issue?
Except there are democratic capitalist countries, all communist countries are dictatorships.
Ahhh, the old “I know nothing about what I’m talking about so I’m going to keep making things up” defense. Classic move and stunningly performed. I can tell you have practice.
The classic: I’m not going to disprove you because I cannot name one communist country that isn’t a dictatorship, but I want to sound cool nonetheless. Well done.
How’s the Che Guevara t-shirt made in a sweatshop doing?
