Monthly Memory & Flash Market Watch
March 2024
Samsung maintains production cuts despite rising NAND flash prices
• Samsung is carefully managing supply by instituting a 50% reduction in production to avoid any potential negative impact on NAND profitability.
• The prevailing view holds that the recent uptick in NAND flash prices is attributed more to supply constraints than to an actual surge in demand.
Kioxia offers SK hynix chip making access in Japan
• The firm is giving Hynix the opportunity to produce semiconductors at its Japanese location in a bid to revive its merger talks with Western Digital.
Kioxia and WD JV to receive up to USD 1 billion government subsidy.
The subsidy will be invested in JV’s Japanese facility that will produce its latest generation of 3D flash memory based on the innovative wafer bonding technology and future generation of advanced nodes.
Micron's 24GB HBM3E chips to power Nvidia's next-gen AI GPUs
• HBM3E is the latest ultra-fast memory from Micron designed for datacenter and AI-class CPUs, e.g. Nvidia’s H200 that is expected to be launched in Q2’24 with six HBM3E memory chips.
• Micron is the first firm to announce HBM3E volume production, with bandwidth improvement from the 1TB/s of HBM3 to 1.2TB/s. The firm is also planning HBM3E 36GB chips that is said to have even higher bandwidth and more power efficiency then the 24GB.
SUPPLY TREND
2023-2024 Worldwide SSD Shipment
after peak shipment in 4Q23, WW SSD demand is expected to grow stably throughout 2024.
2023-2024 Worldwide DRAM Output
2023-2024 NAND Price Trend & Sufficiency Ratio
NAND Sufficiency: maintained at extreme low level from 2H23
Price Trend: NAND Flash price is likely to climb continuously in 1H24, after a sharp rise in 4Q23
2023-2024 DDR4 Price Trend & Sufficiency Ratio
DRAM Sufficiency: maintained at extreme low level during 1Q-2Q24
Price Trend: 8Gb contract price demonstrated obvious growth in Jan.’24., and will remain higher than the spot low level in 2024
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
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."
