The Growth and Future of QLC in the NAND Flash Market

TapTechNews June 14th, the Korean media Sedaily quoted the market analysis firm Omdia as saying that by 2027, the QLC market size will account for 46.4% of the overall NAND flash, only slightly lower than 51% of TLC.

By contrast, Omdia believes that the QLC flash market share in 2023 is only 12.9%, and this year this ratio will increase significantly to 20.7%.

In other words, in the next three years, the proportion of QLC in the overall NAND market will continue to increase by 1.24 times on the basis of this year, reaching 3.6 times that of 2023.

In 2023 and before, the market penetration of QLC mainly occurred in the consumer storage field, while since this year, the popularity of enterprise-level QLC solid-state drives has become an important trend in the market.

Compared to TLC flash particles, QLC can provide larger capacity density, and the disadvantage of its poor low-lifetime performance can be partially mitigated by the more excellent overall configuration and more suitable application environment of enterprise-level solid-state drives.

And under the wave of generative AI, technology companies urgently need a kind of storage that is significantly better in performance than mechanical hard disks but not too high in cost to meet the needs of AI servers. Under this trend, the shipment volume of enterprise-level QLC solid-state drives has risen rapidly.

According to Omdia's data, the QLC NAND market size will increase by 85% this year.

Looking ahead, in addition to the enterprise-level QLC solid-state drive leaders Samsung Electronics and Solidigm, more NAND flash original factories will give QLC a more important status.

TapTechNews' earlier report mentioned that Western Digital is about to officially release the BICS8 QLC flash with a single-chip capacity of 2 Tb, which is specifically designed to meet the needs of data centers and AI.