Why You May Soon Pay More To Upgrade Your PC's RAM And SSD Storage
This news comes to us via Taiwan's United Daily News who reports that after multiple consecutive quarters of poor performance, the memory market has finally rebounded after the aforementioned production cuts. This includes both DRAM manufacturers like Winbond and Micron as well as makers of flash memory products like Adata and Phison.
That's great news for these companies, but it doesn't take an economics degree to reason out what effect production cuts are likely to have on consumers. Reduced production means reduced supply, and assuming that customers' demand for expanded RAM and storage remains at its usual level, we can expect that to mean increased prices on these products, as well as products that require these components.
Of course, this all depends on supply and demand. The market is already seeing a glut of memory products, and it's possible that prices may simply stay stable or even continue to see drops, albeit at a slower pace. At this point, some months after Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA have released their latest products, it's possible that most folks aren't looking for new parts, and that the products on shelves will slowly filter through the market.
UDN quotes ADATA chairman Simon Chen, who says that he expects that the spot prices of DRAM and NAND flash memory to increase by between 10% and 15%. Chen is someone who know what he's talking about in this particular area; ADATA sells a whole bunch of memory products.
So saying, if you're planning on buying RAM or SSDs soon, or building a whole new system, you might want to get it done sooner than later. Besides the situation in the memory market, there's also this whole kerfluffle happening over in Israel right now. It's possible that there could be major supply chain disruptions soon, so we say get while the getting's good instead of waiting for another shortage.
