Prices for 1TB Gaming SSDs Slashed in Half This Year

[DTinn8]

Good news, gamers: SSD prices are reportedly falling. According to a DigiTimes report today, unit prices for 1TB SSDs have fallen more than 50 percent since 2018. Which at time of writing means the prices fell more than one percent a day since the start of the New Year. That should make it easier than ever to hoard as many digital titles as you'd like.

This report only cites unnamed "industry sources." However, it falls in line with recent SSD pricing. It's gotten to the point where you're probably better off buying an SSD than an HDD, so long as you don't need terabytes upon terabytes of storage.

DigiTimes said prices for 1TB gaming SSDs sat around $324 per unit (it didn't specify in what time period exactly), then hit roughly $259 in early 2018 and have finally settled at around just $97 (based on the exchange rate from New Taiwan Dollars to USD). The publication partially attributed this to "drastic NAND price falls, driven by increases in new production capacity."

But those prices could fall even further still, with DigiTimes reporting a projected 15 percent drop in the first quarter of 2019, due to "weakening total bit demand for PC-use SSDs and SSD price falls." That's bad news for storage makers but great for consumers.

Memory is also expected to get cheaper "as memory makers are under increasing pressure to digest inventories amid strong wait-and-see sentiment in terminal markets," DigiTimes added. 

Those shifts don't only benefit consumers. AMD is also said to have become increasingly popular among manufacturers because of Intel's ongoing 14nm CPU shortage. The lack of Intel CPUs has led people to hold off other system upgrades, but that obviously doesn't help vendors with financial targets to hit. Instead, they're faced with the option of either holding off on releasing new products or switching from Intel to AMD until things are settled.

It might be hard to enjoy these decreasing prices when you consider what caused them. But after years of having to overpay for memory and storage, it's nice to be able to make an upgrade without having to sacrifice your firstborn to afford the purchase.

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