Was ram REALLY THAT CHEAP BEFORE?!

jakesully

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Jun 23, 2014
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Hey guys, as you can tell I'm quite young (17) and am only familiar with the more recent prices of ddr3 memory. I've read a bunch about this crazy price climb and no one seems to be able to pinpoint a reason for it. Examples include:

-Major factory flooding in Taiwain (or was it china)
-Price Fixing
-Company going bankrupt
-Factory Fires

Anyway, hopefully someone can give some good insight as to what is going on. It's very interesting (in a horrible horrible way) to see such a radical change in an electronic products value on such a scale. What do you guys think?
 

Byte70

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Jul 23, 2014
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Wow. That's crazy! I had no idea a flood could impact an entire market. Hope it doesn't happen with SSDs, haha!
 


Historically memory has always been rather expensive, the DRAM market did crash a couple of years ago as supply was much greater than demand. There are several hypothesis as to why this occurred, most of them are reasonably well supported. Several DRAM manufacturers that had previously been quite profitable went bankrupt and were acquired by their former competitors.

As Tradesman1 mentioned, in the past year or so there have been several events which have hindered the supply of DRAM including a fire at a Hynix manufacturing plant which interrupted manufacturing and ruined samples that were currently in process, wildly unpredictable demand for devices in China, flooding in Taiwan that affects delivery of other components which has an indirect effect on DRAM demand, etc...

DRAM shipments are traded as commodities just like oil, which means that the price goes up and down every time an investor sneezes

EDIT: word