Monthly Memory & Flash Market Watch
October 2024
Samsung starts mass producing bigger and cheaper SSDs
• The firm's speedier and denser 9th-gen 280-layer QLC V-NAND could make drives 50% cheaper. This 280-layer QLC is purportedly by far the best density and performance compared to its competitors' best QLC solutions with 19.5Gb mm2 storage density and operating speed of 3.2 Gbps which is estimated 33% faster than its competitors.
Kioxia showcased its array of SSD products, technologies and form factors that drive cloud innovation in VMware Explore
• The product array is composed of CD8P series data center NVMe SSDs running Milvus Vector Database for AI on Dell PowerEdge R760 VMware vSAN ReadyNodes, CM7 series enterprise E3.S NVMe SSDs accelerating data-driven innovation with Dell PowerFlex leveraging VMware NVMe/TCP technology.
Thailand approves Western Digital's $693 million investment project
• Thailand government aims to expand hard disk production in the country as cloud technology and data center demand grows.
SK hynix preps for Nvidia Blackwell Ultra and AMD Instinct MI325X with 12-Hi HBM3E
• The mass production of 12-Hi HBM3E memory stacks is ahead of Hynix rivals. Featuring a 36GB capacity and setting the stage for next-gen AI and HPC processors, including AMD's Instinct MI325X (due in the Q4’24) and Nvidia's Blackwell (expected to arrive in 2025 2H), the data rate of 12-Hi HBM3E to be 9.6 GT/s, providing a peak bandwidth of 1.22 TB/s per module.
Micron delivered 93% YoY revenue growth in fiscal Q4 2024
• Revenue of $25.11 billion versus $15.54 billion for the prior year.
• Robust AI demand drove a strong ramp of the firm’s data center DRAM and HBM products. Its NAND quarterly revenue exceeded $1 billion for the first time, which was also led by data center SSD sales.
SUPPLY TREND
2024-2025 Worldwide SSD Shipment
WW SSD demand is expected to reach a peak at the end of 2024, and 2025 general shipping status is likely to stay above 2024’s quarterly level
2024-2025 Worldwide DRAM Output
2024-2025 NAND Price Trend & Sufficiency Ratio
Flash Sufficiency: maintained at low level since 2024/B
Price Trend: NAND flash is likely to experience a gradual decline until Q2/M’25, and trending flat before a slight hike in demand during peak seasons in 2025/E
2024-2025 DDR4 Price Trend & Sufficiency Ratio
DRAM Sufficiency: demand is likely to recover during 2025 1H, which might bring contract price a bit lower than current level
Price Trend: The divergence between 8Gb contract price and spot price appeared from Q2/B’24, the general HBM demand might be the reason keeping contract price at a high level while spot price continues downward
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 BiCS5 |
● | ▂ | |
|
3D TLC (BiCS4) * Tight supply. We encourage you to migrate to BICS5. |
● | ▂ | |
| 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."
