For the last 2 years, we have seen the GPU prices increase to an insane level. This was the year when things were getting back to normal until we got a piece of unfortunate news from Western Digital. Western Digital, mostly famous for making storage drives, have just announced that they are increasing the price of their Solid State Drives or SSDs by 10%.
Phison Electronics is a Taiwan-based firm responsible for producing NAND flash chips controllers. Their CEO, Pan Jiancheng, revealed that there had been contamination in the Kioxia and Western Digital chip factories, which has affected the production and supply of flash memory.
Previously, due to material contamination, the manufacturing of 3D NAND flash memory was halted in late January. The company was forced to rely on inventories and did not begin operations until early March. The contamination affected the production so much that they wasted an entire batch of memory chips.
According to Western Digital, the contamination event impacted at least 6.5 billion gigabytes of flash memory production capacity, whereas Apacer stated that the actual effect exceeded the projected 6.5EB (Western Digital makes up about 30 percent of the total flash storage market). In fact, after more than a month of closure, the market price of flash memory has begun to grow steadily, and an increase in the price of SSD is unavoidable.
Consequently, Western Digital has announced a price hike in SSDs of a 10% increase to meet the demand and supply. We can’t be sure when the prices will be back to normal yet. However, they are expected to be back to normal after the increased Q3 demand is met. Seeing how far SSDs have come and every person who builds a gaming PC tends to have an SSD as a boot drive, the shortage will affect a lot of consumers and we can only hope that it gets better as soon as possible.
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News Reporter
Abdullah is an avid gamer who primarily plays single-player titles. If you can’t find him anywhere, he’ll probably be at his desk playing The Witcher 3 for the millionth time. When he isn’t playing games, he’s either reading or writing about them.
