The sources said SSD prices have started to decline since the beginning of 2018 after having trended upward for 18 months, due partly to weak demand in the slow season in the first quarter and partly to improved yield rates for NAND flash and 3D NAND flash leading to oversupply of the memory chips.

The small size and strong shock-resistance of SSD are quite appealing to portable notebooks, and vendors are expected to gradually boost the SSD adoption ratio for their models to over 55% by leveraging SSD price declines. And the mainstream SSD storage spec adopted is also being upgraded from 128GB to 256GB, or even toward 512GB and 1TB.

Industry sources said that Intel is reportedly to start volume production of QLC (quad-level cell) SSDs that involve larger storage capacity and lower cost in the second quarter of 2018. This is expected to further inspire notebook vendors to adopt large-capacity SSDs.

In early 2018, Intel released new-generation 760P SSDs, which feature 64-layer 3D NAND QLC to support storage, with the capacity ranging from 512GB to 2TB.

But industry sources said that midrange to low-end notebook models are expected to adopt a mix of SSD and traditional disks to reduce cost while also improving the notebook operating speed.

SSDs increasingly applied to notebooks
Photo: Michael Lee, DigiTimes, April 2018

Aaron Lee, Taipei; Willis Ke, DIGITIMES