NAND Shortage Could Spell The End of Cheap SSDs

In the last year, SSDs have been very cheap with 2TB NVMe’s as low as £60 making a storage expansion one of the cheapest upgrades you can make for your system, hell even DDR4 is dirt cheap now as well. Unfortunately, if you haven’t taken advantage of these prices you may soon be out of luck as prices are looking to increase.

Possible NAND Flash Shortage

A report from DigiTimes Asia (Via TomsHardware) has explained that Phison, who makes many of the memory controllers in SSDs, claims that a shortage of materials needed to construct NAND chips is on the horizon. The company is prepaying its chip suppliers to ensure that they have enough NAND chips which will in turn bump up the costs and then even more so if a shortage comes in. Additionally with the low demand of SSDs currently due to many factors, current supply is also quite low to match that demand so it all will just tack on.

I was expecting this myself as I recently had a conversation with a friend who works closely with an SSD manufacturer who made a similar claim of NAND flash shortages.

I’ve got 4TB in my system and I’ve no need to upgrade and I don’t see myself upgrading any time in the near future either, so I can hold on. I imagine that will be the case for a lot of other casual PC users or gamers who have already taken advantage of some cheap SSD deals so unless you intend on buying the next Call of Duty game, don’t panic.