Monthly Memory & Flash Market Watch
December 2024
Samsung reshuffles semiconductor execs after poor performance in memory and NAND competitiveness
• Samsung has revamped its leadership team to strengthen its memory and foundry chip divisions as it strives to compete with rivals SK hynix and TSMC in the rapidly growing AI market.
• The firm is rumored to suffer from low foundry yields, failing to land strategically important orders from large clients. It has smaller market share of HBM3E memory than SK hynix, and is behind both Micron and SK hynix in terms of validation by Nvidia.
Kioxia adopted for NEDO project to innovate memory under post-5G system infrastructure project
• AI is estimated to generate an unprecedented volume of data in the post-5G information and communication era, next-gen. memories facilitate rapid data transfer with high-performance processors while increasing capacity and reducing power consumption.
• Collaborating with Japan’s national research and development agency-NEDO, Kioxia will focus on the R&D of Compute Express Link (CXL) interface standard to pursue lower power consumption and higher bit density than DRAM, and faster read speed than flash memory.
WDC released SSDs for creators and gamers
• New products include 2-4TB ($280/$430) SanDisk Extreme PRO with USB4 performance portable SSD, 8TB ($800) SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD, 1-2TB ($60/$160) WD_BLACK SN7100 NVMe M.2 SSD, and 2TB ($200) WD_BLACK C50 Expansion Card for Xbox.
SK hynix leads market with HBM3e 16hi products
• This new product features a 48GB capacity per cube and is aimed at applications that include CSPs’ custom ASICs and general-purpose GPUs.The 16hi HBM3e is expected to push memory capacity limits ahead of the HBM4 generation’s launch, with sampling scheduled for 2025 1H.
Micron sampling 6550 ION PCIe Gen5 up to 61TB data center SSD in E3.S form factor
• As the industry’s 1st E3.S and PCIe Gen5 60TB SSD,the 6550 ION excels in high-capacity NVMe workloads such as networked AI data lakes, ingest, data preparation and checkpointng, file and object storage, public cloud storage, analytic databases, and content delivery. It has just entered customer sample stage.
SUPPLY TREND
2024-2025 Worldwide SSD Shipment
WW SSD demand is expected to reach a peak at the end of 2024, and 2025 shipment is expected to grow gradually by quarter
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 price is likely to drop during 4Q24-1Q25, yet some chip makers plan to do a new round of production cuts to reduce the extent price drops
2024-2025 DDR4 Price Trend & Sufficiency Ratio
DRAM Sufficiency: maintained at extreme low level throughout 2024 but is likely to have more production in 2025 1H to fulfill HBM demands
Price Trend: 8Gb contract price had a strong rebound at Q1/E’24, price level is similar since then. In 2025, DRAM price might drop a bit but remain relatively high from the lowest spot price level
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."
