So... does that mean they'll be hiking NAND prices, just like with HDD prices after the Thai floods?
But we all know that markets are driven by emotion: losing 3.5% of your raw materials in a market that is projected to grow 45% will cause big fluctuations. But that is just my opinion.
I can understand how NAND prices don't look suspect if you're not terribly familiar with the history and low-level factors of the industry, but if you really look into it, it's kind of ridiculous. The same companies price-fixed DRAM chips and got busted. Then they price-fixed LCD panels and got busted. Then they price-fixed DRAM chips again and got busted again. They were being investigated for price-fixing NAND chips, but the South Korean president shut down the investigation. Shortly before being ousted for rampant corruption (and then being bailed out of prison by Samsung). Anything that is present in such a gigantic variety of devices should cost almost nothing. That's just economics. It becomes commoditized. The materials involved and their rarity become the primary drivers of price. Comparing price per terabyte of storage between mechanical drives and NAND-based storage is the most telling to me personally. The technology that goes into modern high density mechanical hard drives is utter madness. They should be, by all accounts, astronomically expensive. They use helium, of which there is a global shortage. They coat the platters with rubidium and other rare materials. They include neodymium magnets. They include high precision mechanical motors that spin platters fast enough that the surface tension against the air becomes a significant factor (leading to the use of helium) and still maintain enough precision to be able to seek to a very precise spot in nanoseconds. Also, you've got 'hybrid' drives that include both the mechanical and NAND storage... which incurs almost no premium over the pure mechanical solution. Now they're beginning to produce drives with integrated lasers for heat-assisted magnetic recording. And these are still many times cheaper on a $/TB basis compared to.... just a dumb parallel array of NAND gates that don't require anything rare?
I was mostly thinking of serial flash chips there, which use a very different interface from plain NAND; they have their own little controller built into them. They are used in relatively big numbers for firmware etc. Even if they had the same interface, there is still a huge gap between a 128 MBit chip and the densities you find in PC storage, where we now have 512 GBit chips.
Samsung & Co. might make them too, but you mostly see other semicons badged on them.
According to your data, the total quaterly production is 41 exabytes for SSD, which would mean losing about 37% of the total SSD production this quarter.
That being said, it is the first time I read about the scale of storage production worldwide. It makes you wonder what does the humanity store in those hundreds of exabytes per year. Probably many duplicated data or unused bytes.
That makes it a poor choice for serving anything but the rarest of YouTube videos.
Let’s as a hypothetical assume that Apple iPhones average 128GB of storage in 2019 (they go up to 512gb after all now). Let’s also assume Apple sells 50M iPhones in 2019. Doing the math, assuming my wild estimates are right, that gives us about 6.4 exabytes of storage usage in 2019 for just iPhones alone.
Android however ships something like 1.25B devices per year. The storage average is way lower I’d assume, but that’s still easily in the tens of exabytes per year most likely.
Sure there will be some clever parties that will make some money anticipating this. But that's the same reason why the price of the gas at the pump that was already in the tank jumps up because of a shortage somewhere else. The whole stock is instantly valued at a different price.