Market analysis predicts that prices of solid-state drives, which have been declining steeply in recent years, will start to flatten next year. This is due to a foreseen shortage of SSDs, especially those targeted at ultrathin laptops and hybrids, reports PC World. However, despite the slowing downward price momentum, the cost-per-gigabyte is expected to decline moderately as the storage capacity of drives continues to increase each year, storage analyst at IHS, Fang Zhang, commented.
Most laptops which boast a thin and light chassis use SSDs which are built-in closely to the motherboard, contrary to the SSDs in mainstream laptops which can be plugged into bays and are upgradeable without much difficulty. With storage making up around 8 to 9 per cent of the cost of building portable devices, Zhang said that the SSD price drops have contributed significantly to declining laptop prices over recent times. However this welcome trend may not help reduce Ultrabook or hybrid prices in 2015, due to shortages.
Another reason ultrathin SSD price declines will be stemmed next year could be due to the fact that NAND flash makers are contributing more factory capacity to manufacturing smartphone and tablet storage. That could indeed be more lucrative for them – just consider Apple's iPad storage differential pricing for example, adding as much as £100 to the consumer price for 16GB of extra built-in flash storage. Therefore, we may see OEMs resort to adjusting other features to shrink the cost of building ultrathin devices, such as lowering screen resolutions, reducing DRAM capacity or removing webcams.
M.2 format SSD storage
The price of SSD storage for ultrathin devices is expected to average $111 for 197GB this year, up to 264GB in 2015. It is forecasted to drop to $109 for 340GB in 2016 and then plummet to $93 for 405GB in 2017 and $79 for 465GB in 2018, Zhang said. Manufacturers including Samsung and Sandisk have plans to shift more factory capacity to make SSDs for ultrathin notebooks. This is said to be the main contributing factor to the expected SSD price drop in 2016.
