NAND Flash contamination sees WD and Kioxia lose 6.5 exabytes of storage

The SSD market could see a price spike over the coming months, as Western Digital and Kioxia have reportedly lost 6.5 exabytes of flash storage to contamination issues at its factories. 

As reported by TrendForce, Western Digital (WDC) and Kioxia found a material contamination at NAND Flash production lines in Japan, resulting in approximately 6.5 exabytes (6.5 billion gigabytes) of storage being lost. This accounts for roughly 13 percent of WDC and Kioxia's joint output in Q1 2022, and just 3% of projected output for the full year.

The contamination was limited to 3D NAND, so this shouldn't impact some of WD's other products. However, a lot of chips were still lost and as a result, prices will increase for SSDs.

Currently, it is expected that we'll see NAND Flash pricing jump by up to 10 percent in Q2 2022, which will have an impact on the prices of SSDs over the next several months.

KitGuru Says: While this sounds like an astonishing amount of storage to lose, it is said to be just 3% of the output expected from two factories in Japan, jointly owned by WDC and Kioxia. Hopefully this initial expected price jump can normalise by the second half of the year as the tech industry continues to recover from two years worth of various chip shortages. 

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