Many laptops nowadays come with a Solid State Drive or SSD in short. They are fast, compact and get more reliable with each new generation. Yet despite years of research and competition, SSDs are still expensive. The cheapest 256 GB M.2 SSDs, the kind you will find in most laptops, are still around $80. For the same price, you can get a 2 TB (2048 GB) classic HDD.
Luckily, a recent TrendForce press release indicates that things will change a bit in the upcoming month.
During the first quarter of 2018, the SSD market has seen less stock up orders from PC OEMs, with manufacturers cutting the prices in order to convince their buyers to adopt the new 64/72-layer 3D-SSD products. Thus, the average contract prices of mainstream Client SSD for PC OEMs are estimated to drop by 3-5% in the SATA-SSD sector and 4-6% in PCIe-SSD sector, as the same press release quietly informs us.
Indeed, after a period of manufacturer domination, we are finally talking about oversupply and expected price drops on the SSD market. If the adoption rate of solid-state drives in notebooks was only 45% during the past year, in 2018, we can expect an over 50% rate! A PCIe SSD adoption rate increase is also expected, since this standard has a better performance rate and is more compact.
While 512GB and 1TB SSDs still need more time to become affordable, we can expect most mid-range and gaming notebooks to come equipped with SSD drives in the nearby future.
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