At the beginning of the year, we reported a price drop forecast for SSDs and other storage devices based on NAND Flash memory. Unfortunately, it seems this downward price trend won’t last for long, and the bottom will likely be reached by early summer. After that, the trend is expected to reverse, and prices will unfortunately start to rise again. The window to snag extra terabytes at a bargain prices won’t last long.
Analyst firm TrendForce, which has long tracked the prices of NAND and DRAM memory and also produces forecasts, has now released a longer-term estimate of price trends for memory used in storage devices for the entire year 2025. TrendForce looks at the issue from the side of the manufacturers (and their investors), seeing rising pricesas good news. Unfortunately, the forecast for the second half of the year now indicates exactly that.
According to TrendForce, prices for various NAND-based products will only be declining during the first and second quarter. For the current quarter (Q1 2025), the firm has an estimate (partially based on real data) suggesting that the average price of NAND products will drop by 13–18 %. Unfortunately, this isn’t broken down into categories like raw NAND and consumer SSDs, which are of most interest to us.
Unfortunately, it seems that by the second quarter (Q2 2025), the price drops will have run their course, as TrendForce predicts a further decline of just 0–5 %. This means that if you’re impatient, you probably won’t go wrong by making those postponed SSD purchases around mid-spring. The price bottom moment is likely to occur sometime by June or shortly thereafter.
Price increases will return in the second half of the year
According to TrendForce, the second half of the year will see the effects of NAND manufacturers cutting production volumes in response to the current price falls that were caused by market oversupply. TrendForce expects the market to stabilize, coupled with increased demand for large SSDs due to the AI application boom (the report amusingly states that demand will be supported by “AI and DeepSeek applications”). Server SSDs are expected to see the most significant price increases, but this is likely to indirectly affect all products using NAND.
Some parts of the text make it seem as though analysts are seizing every opportunity to find potential for increased demand and prices, which might appear suspicious. However, track record of TrendForce’s forecasts are not entirely unreliable, and Nvidia’s story shows that the industry is willing to pour incredible amounts of money into AI, whether it’s prudent or not (there are those who doubt the return on the multi-billion-dollar investments). Therefore, we shouldn’t take this forecast lightly.
During the third quarter (Q3 2025), TrendForce predicts that NAND memory and SSDs will increase in price by 10–15 %, marking a shift from a flat price movement in Q2 right to a noticeable price hike. This trend is expected to continue into the fourth quarter (Q4 2025), with a further increase of 8–13 %. Overall, this means a price increase of 19–30 % during the second half of the year.
This isn’t exactly good news, as this time the price fall didn’t last very long. Unfortunately, the cyclical fluctuations in the memory markets continue their periodic yo-yo movement. There’s some hope that the optimistic projections of massive demand for large SSDs for AI servers and PCs (among which TrendForce also mentions Nvidia’s Project Digits—hard to say if it can truly achieve such massive sales) might not fully materialize, and the price increases in the second half of the year might not “pan out” as much as the analysts predict.
Even with such a potentially flawed prediction, the outcome likely won’t be too far off, so the best time to buy SSDs will probably still be around mid-year. We’ll keep an eye on further updates from TrendForce, and by mid-year, a newer forecast for the third quarter should also be available, so we’ll keep you informed.
Source: TrendForce, via: TechPowerUp
English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš
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What window to snag bargain prices? It was gone long ago. A 4TB Samsung QVO on Amazon was £163 in October 2023, now it’s £240. An 8TB was £300, now they’re £530. The good times ended a long time ago, well before the beginning of this year.