One of last week’s blog entries discussed the topic “Why are SSDs still so expensive?” and tied SSD costs firmly to NAND Flash pricing. In August of this year, Forward Insights’ founder and Principal Analyst Gregory Wong presented his NAND Flash pricing forecasts through the year 2012. Wong presented on a panel at the Flash Memory Summit held in Santa Clara, California. Here’s the chart he presented:

You can see that from 2007 to 2008, NAND Flash pricing was in freefall and dropped from nearly $9/Gbyte to less than $2/Gbyte. This drop had two big effects. It hammered the NAND Flash vendors and it enticed a lot of companies to jump into the SSD market with visions of even cheaper NAND Flash chips on the horizon.

For now, it looks like NAND Flash pricing is on a more manageable price decline through 2012, at least according to this Forward Insights forecast. While this easing of the rate of price decline doesn’t bode well for those who look forward to large future price drops for SSDs, it provides hope for some bedrock stability for other NAND Flash applications such as AgigA Tech’s server-class, bulletproof AGIGARAM memory modules.