SSD Prices to Go As Low As 0.4 Dollars per Gigabyte

OCZ Technology Group has recently posted its great financial results. During talks with the company regarding the current market situation, the company’s CEO Ryan Petersen reportedly said:

"With recent NAND flash price decreases, we have been able to introduce market leading products with price points of approximately 0.65 dollars per gigabyte without negatively impacting our gross margins. These cost reductions continue to drive SSD adoption and we feel it is critical to continue to drive cost down. With that, we planned to launch both 10nm-class memory and TLC support during the year subject to NAND availability. In short, we expect recent declines in NAND flash pricing to make SSDs more attractive to mainstream applications such as SANs, network appliances, ultrabooks and mainstream servers."

We believe that the SSD mainstream prices will go well below 0.65 dollars per gigabyte in the near future. Once the NAND flash industry moves to the 10 nm manufacturing process, the density of flash cells per wafer will be more than double.

This would logically manifest through a series of modest price reductions for the current drives, and later, through the introduction of higher capacity drives at the same established price ranges.

Intel has been sampling 20 nm flash cells since March last year and Hynix has been showing 15 nm cells since late 2011.

Considering that the price of SSDs dropped by more than half, together with the move from 34 nm production to 25 nm manufacturing, we believe that when moving from 25 nm to 19 nm or 15 nm, the prices will again be reduced by almost 50 percent.

Of course, the prices won’t reach a true halved level like the one of 0.32 dollars per gigabyte, nor do we desire that the profit of innovative companies like OCZ go as low as to affect their R&D departments or investment plans.

In our opinion, a medium price of 0.40 dollars per gigabyte will be in effect in less than a year from now, even without manufacturing technologies as low as 10 nm.