Welcome to 2019. The post-2016 era of flash drive prices rising upwards of over 40% are a distant memory, and manufacturing plants are pumping out more supply into the market than ever before. We can’t believe it took them this long to get it right, but 3D NAND fabrication has finally picked up pace, causing a surge in supply which can only mean one thing: Regularly decreasing prices as 2019 progresses.
3D NAND technology was meant to usher in a new world of faster, smaller, better. While it has shown great promise in the SSD world, the promotional USB drive market has yet to reap the benefits of the complex architecture within these tiny chips, other than to say that we know for sure most of our supplied product are now coming in using this multi-level structuring.
So what are we to expect for this year? Other than a slow and steady decline in USB prices across the board, we are hopeful that access to larger memory and faster read/write speeds, especially within the USB 3.0 category. This past month there has been a most notable decline in the cost of USB 3.0 chips in the COB (chip on board) sector between the sizes of 64GB and 128GB, and while USB prices usually surge slightly post Chinese New Year Festival, it seemed to have only affected a few specific memory sizes, and only temporarily as things have already settled back to pre CNY prices within those spots.
So be on the look out for some new USB 3.0 models to hit the category, and see some dips in prices by Q3 2019 in most of the USB 3.0 sizes within our custom USB family. In short, we expect to see a greater number of users switch from USB 2.0 as their standard to USB 3.0, given the more reasonable access, from a price standpoint.
In addition, be on the lookout for new USB type-C flash drives to hit our site in the next couple of months. Both dual (USB + USB type-C) memory stick sizes as well as USB type-C only custom flash drives, as this type of port comes standard on more and more new computers, laptops and tablets.
Oh, and did I mention we’re moments away from launching our new website? Stay tuned – it’s going to be awesome!