OCZ Technology Group, one of the market leaders in SSDs has said that due to the recent cuts in NAND flash memory pricing along with improvements to its proprietary controller technology, it has been able to bring its SSD pricing to about $0.65/GB. OCZ claims it can do this without a negative impact on its gross margins either.
The company predicts possible further price reductions through the use of Triple Level Cell (TLC) NAND and upcoming 10nm process NAND. Depending on NAND availability, OCZ plans to launch SSDs using 10nm process and TCL NAND. TCL stores 3-bits per cell in comparison to today's 2-bits per cell with MLC and costs a third less to produce, however, it currently suffers from poor endurance and performance, but work is being carried out to overcome these issues.
Since SSDs first came on the market, the $1/GB mark was long seen as the holy grail for SSDs to start attracting mainstream users. With these recent price cuts that beat and go well beyond this point, SSDs are now predicted to become a popular upgrade option for existing PCs. These prices will also be especially attractive to businesses where these price cuts make SSDs much more affordable for SANs and servers where the price gap between enterprise HDDs continues to decline.
OCZ's net revenue for SSD products during its Fiscal Year 2012 increased 154% to $338.9 million in comparison to the previous year with $133.2 million. Their total revenue for Fiscal Year 2012 was $365.8 million, clearly showing how profitable SSD for them. They expect net revenue to increase to between $630 and $700 million in its Fiscal Year 2013, not including any possible technology breakthroughs.
At $0.65/GB, this works out at US$83.20 (€63.55) for 128GB or US$166.40 (€127.09) for 256GB. Now it's just waiting time for these price cuts to reach high street and online shops.
