The NAND flash memory market is certainly fickle, but like many of you, I am looking forward to the continued decline in SSD prices. But the NAND flash memory market is certainly fickle; there are multiple reports of NAND prices rising perhaps as much as 40%.

These figures come from a Digitimes report citing unnamed sources within the memory supply chain. According to this article, memory manufacturers expect prices for nonvolatile memory components (such as those found in SSDs) to rise 40% by the fourth quarter of this year due to a combination of factors.

One of the reasons cited is supply problems; incidentally, according to Reuters, Samsung recently had to stop NAND and DRAM production at one of its factories due to a power outage. The outage lasted about a minute, but Samsung, the world's largest memory chip supplier, expected a delay of two to three days in resuming operations.

Samsung suffered a similar outage last year, costing the company about $43 million. It is unclear how this one compares in terms of financial impact.

Normally, I don't have much faith in unnamed sources. But Digitimes is not alone in sounding the alarm bells: market research firm TrendForce, a division of DRAMeXchange, is also predicting higher prices for NAND flash memory this year.

TrendForce is being quite conservative in its forecast, at least in the short term: it predicts a 10% increase in the first quarter of 2020.

"While actual demand for NAND flash products has exceeded off-season expectations, supply growth appears to be conservative and suppliers are reducing inventories. Therefore, we expect contract prices for NAND flash products to continue to rise in the first quarter of 2020," TrendForce said.

I contacted TrendForce and asked what kind of price increases they expect for consumer SSDs and how long this could continue.

In the meantime, I'm not going to hit the panic button; as Trendforce points out, contract prices for client SSDs have fallen for seven straight quarters (one of the best SSDs for gaming, Crucial's P1 1TB NVMe, is on Amazon for barely above $100). If this is the case to begin with, there is room for prices to rise without feeling ripped off.

That said, I've seen a lot of great deals on SSDs lately. If you need a nudge to jump on board, here you go.