Monthly Memory & Flash Market Watch
January 2024
Samsung delays mass production at its Texas fab
• The company scales back its Texas operation due to uncertain CHIPS Act subsidies and the global economy.
• The CHIPS and Science Act, which is supposed to be provided to semiconductor companies to encourage the construction of foundries in the U.S., is still largely in the pipeline, with just $35 million of the total $52 billion granted so far.
WD’s board of directors approved a plan to separate its HDD and flash businesses
*Facts about PCIe 5.0: developed by PCI-SIG, up to 14,000 MB/s read, enables twice the data transfer speed and bandwidth versus the PCIe 4.0 spec
• Kioxia CM7 and CD8P series drives can now be found on the PCI-SIG Integrator’s List
SK hynix's market share of the DRAM market has reached 35% as of Q3’23
• This is the most notable growth among manufacturers, reaching $4.626 billion and significantly narrowing the firm’s market share gap with Samsung to less than 5%.
• The firm benefited from growth in HBM and DDR5 shipments and is expecting a steady quarterly rise in 2024 in line with DDR5’s growing market penetration.
Recent Micron strategies in China is considered as moves to make amends with the Chinese authorities
*Background: Chinese government’s prohibition against Micron chips in the nation's critical infrastructure affects its business significantly
• The firm reached a global settlement concerning a seven-year-old intellectual property theft lawsuit against Chinese state-owned Jinhua Integrated Circuit Co.
• Micron promised to invest another 4.3 billion yuan (US$ 606.2 million) in its chip-making plants in China.
SUPPLY TREND
2023-2024 Worldwide SSD Shipment
Q4 demand is at the highest level of 2023.
2023-2024 Worldwide DRAM Output
2023-2024 NAND Price Trend & Sufficiency Ratio
NAND Sufficiency: maintained at extreme low level from 2H23 to 2024
Price Trend: NAND Flash price is likely to climb continuously during 1H24, after a sharp rise in 4Q23
2023-2024 DDR4 Price Trend & Sufficiency Ratio
DRAM Sufficiency: maintained at extreme low level starting from Q423
Price Trend: 8Gb contract price overlapped the spot low level in Dec.’24., and will climb up slowly in 1H24
SUPPLY SIGNAL
| Type | Supply | Price | |
|---|---|---|---|
|
DRAM Module  |
DDR3 | ● | ▲ |
| DDR4 | ● | ▲ | |
| DDR5 | ● | ▲ | |
|
Flash Storage  |
SLC | ● | ▂ |
| MLC | ● | ▂ | |
|
3D TLC (BiCS3) *Limited Supply. We encourage you to migrate to BiCS4 and BiCS5 |
● | ▲ | |
| 3D TLC (BiCS4) | ● | ▲ | |
| 3D TLC (BiCS5) | ● | ▲ |
●Smooth Supply ● Mildly Tight Supply ● Tight supply ▂ Flat ▲ Upward trend ▼ Downward trend
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Insights
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How to Choose Industrial SSD for Medical Devices?
Medical devices are rapidly becoming more digital. From medical imaging systems, patient monitoring devices, endoscopy systems, and automated dispensing cabinets to healthcare edge gateways, an increasing number of healthcare applications must continuously record medical images, sensor data, operation logs, alarm events, and system status while supporting diagnostic and treatment workflows.
What Is an NVMe SSD?
Learn what an NVMe SSD is, how NVMe differs from SATA SSDs, and why NVMe storage is ideal for automation, industrial systems, and high-frequency data logging.
What Is ECC DRAM?
Learn what ECC DRAM is, how error correction works, and why it matters for data integrity, system stability, networking security, and mission-critical computing.
How to Choose NVR Storage: Key Factors for Efficient Surveillance Systems
NVR storage is not only about capacity planning. It also affects data integrity and long-term system reliability. For AI NVR and 24/7 recording environments, storage devices must handle heavy write workloads, RAID rebuilding, and continuous recording. As a result, choosing between HDD vs. SSD and selecting the right surveillance SSD have become critical for modern surveillance deployment.
What Is the SSD Temperature Range?
Temperature is the silent limiter of every SSD, and the SSD temperature range is both a performance spec as well as a reliability spec. Under sustained load, NVMe firmware tracks a composite temperature and will start to throttle lightly or heavily. So, write throughput drops hard and latency spikes. Heat also speeds charge leakage inside NAND, which accelerates retention loss. The effect worsens as cells age from program/erase wear. Thus, you burn endurance faster and raise data-retention trouble when the drive later remains unpowered.
Garbage Collection in Industrial SSDs: What You Need to Know
Garbage collection in SSDs is the controller's quiet cleanup job. It compacts still-valid pages into new space and erases blocks that are now mostly junk. That might sound weird until you remember NAND flash can't overwrite a programmed page. It must erase first, and erase happens at the block level, not per page. So, updates become "write elsewhere, then clean later."
