Why it matters: If analysts are correct, we could be seeing very significant price drops in SSD and perhaps even DRAM it 2019. The industry is currently facing a very large surplus of NAND flash memory. They say to expect a price correction over the next several quarters.

Jim Handy, a market analyst with Objective Analysis, predicts that the flash memory industry is headed for a “downward pricing correction” in 2019, if not a full-on collapse. If prices crash, we could be looking at SSD prices as low as eight cents per gigabyte. At last week’s Flash Memory Summit, Handy said that even without a full collapse, the downturn will be the biggest “price correction in the history of semiconductor products.

The Register reports that currently, NAND flash prices are hovering around $0.30/GB. A 66-percent dip would bring SSDs into a more competitive range to HDDs causing cannibalization leading to a downturn for some manufacturers like Seagate and Western Digital.
Manufacturers could allocate more NAND to producing DRAM, but this, in turn, would result in an oversupplying that sector.