Looking at buying an SSD? Hold fire for now – prices are predicted to drop (and on top of that, Black Friday is on the horizon)

Ready to get a bargain? Sluggish demand for consumer SSDs means drives should get cheaper as 2024 rolls on

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SSD prices could drop by something like 10% in the near future, so you might want to hold fire on any potential drive purchase for now.

The fresh pricing prediction comes from analyst firmTrendForcewhich regularly produces reports on memory pricing, and the latest such forecast for the storage market is that NAND Flash contract prices (those charged by component suppliers to drive makers) will decline to the tune of 3% to 8% in this quarter (Q4).

That’s due to “weaker-than-expected sales of end products driving buyers [drive makers] to adopt a conservative approach.” We’re further told that the consumer market is ‘sluggish’ right now, and there’s a hint thatCopilot+ PCsaren’t performing perhaps as well as they should (though elsewhere,huge sales for those AI laptops have been forecast, at least from 2025 onwards).

TrendForce observes: “From a demand perspective, inflation and limited practical use cases for AI have hindered any significant upgrade cycles despite manufacturers actively introducing AI-powered PCs.”

Furthermore, while demand is sluggish, inventory is increasing. TrendForce notes: “Meanwhile, on the supply side, several major manufacturers returned to full capacity utilization in Q3, while other suppliers increased production through process upgrades, resulting in a modest rise in overall capacity.”

Consumer SSD supply was constricted early this year(withprices rising), so this is a distinct turnaround with those supply level cranking up – but now they’re not being met by demand from buyers out there.

The upshot is that the price of consumer SSDs is predicted to drop by 5% to 10% during this quarter. (Enterprise drives, mind you, are a different story, and will likely see some ‘modest’ price growth, with sales being stable enough – and AI certainly helping in that respect).

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Analysis: Playing a waiting game

We may well see the impact of price drops being realized in around a month or so, then – and what else happens in about a month or so? That would beBlack Friday, and so that’s another good reason to bide your time if you’re currently mulling an SSD upgrade.

One way or another, as the end of November rolls around, SSD prices should have dropped anyway, and obviously we’ll have a whole pile of potential tempting storage deals in the Black Friday sales anyway. And while you wait it out, you could always plan what drive you might want to buy by checking out our list of the currentbest SSDs, whether you’re after a new drive for your PC or console.

ViaTweakTown

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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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