AI Boom Hits SSD Market: Samsung's SATA Exit - Will the Price Shock Also Hit SSDs?
[19:11 Mon,15.December 2025 by Thomas Richter]
According to new rumors, Samsung intends to exit the production of SATA SSDs and announce this in January, with short- and medium-term consequences for the entire SSD market. This is also a consequence of the AI boom, as the demand for hardware such as graphics cards, memory, and SSDs for new AI data centers remains unabated. It therefore makes sense for Samsung to focus more on the production of high-priced NVMe SSDs and HBM4/GDDR7 memory solutions rather than cheap SATA SSDs for the broad consumer market—especially since NVMe SSDs are more profitable for Samsung than 2.5" SATA SSDs.
Samsung SATA SSD 870 EVO
Micron recently made a similar move, announcing that it would discontinue its Crucial brand, which targets consumer hard drives and memory modules (see www.slashcam.de/news/single/Bye-Bye-Crucial---Micron-stellt-Speichergeschaeft-f-19685.html). According to rumors, Samsung will soon only produce enough SATA SSDs to fulfill existing contracts. Samsung&s exit as a SATA SSD producer would hit the market hard, as Samsung manufactures a significant share of all SATA SSDs. The consequences would be scarcity and price increases that would affect not only SATA SSDs but also NVMe SSDs, as manufacturers and users will inevitably switch to them. This effect comes on top of the price increases due to the DRAM crisis.
Perhaps it is surprising that the market for slow SATA SSDs (limited by the 560 MB/s limit of SATA compared to up to 12 GB/s for NVMe PCIe 5.0 x4 SSDs) is still large enough for Samsung&s move to have such an impact. However, budget PCs and users looking to upgrade their old computers still buy these SSDs in relatively large numbers—as a rough estimate, about every third best-selling SSD on Amazon is a SATA SSD. If Samsung&s announcement comes, many dependent system builders and manufacturers will likely hoard the still-available models, thus exacerbating the scarcity prematurely—even if the actual production stop takes some time.
Since Samsung is one of the major SSD producers, the end of its SSD manufacturing will likely have a significant impact on the market. Unlike Micron&s closure of its consumer division Crucial, Samsung&s SATA SSDs will not be available under another label; they will simply be missing from the market, driving up prices. For filmmakers, rising prices are relevant in two ways: firstly, SATA SSDs themselves are important for some, as several cameras and recorders such as the Blackmagic Production Camera 4K, the Atomos Ninja/Shogun with Master Caddy II, or Blackmagic&s HyperDeck Studio use stable SATA SSDs via a 2.5" slot as recording media, and secondly, upgrades or new systems will naturally become more expensive.
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