According to Tom's Hardware, Nelson Duann, vice president of Huirong Technology, said in an interview at Computex 2026 that the retail SSD market has almost disappeared in the first half of 2026.
Duann pointed out that most of the SSD controllers sold by Huirong to module manufacturers are now used in PC OEMs. The reason is that PC manufacturers such as Acer, Asus, Dell, and HP cannot obtain sufficient NAND flash memory or SSD supply directly from the original manufacturers, and can only turn to module factories to purchase finished hard drives.
In the past, module factories mainly focused on the retail market, serving end users and DIY players, and providing aftermarket products with stronger performance and better heat dissipation.
However, since the end of last year, OEM demand has strengthened sharply, and module factories have directly supplied a considerable part of their production capacity to PC manufacturers. Duann said that this change means that most of the main controllers sold by Huirong to module factories are eventually installed in the complete machines of PC OEMs.
Duann believes that the reallocation of NAND flash memory supply from consumer levels to AI data centers has triggered structural changes in the storage market.
This change is a heavy blow to some companies, but for SSD master developers such as Huirong and Phison, the situation is generally positive. While demand for server-grade hard drives continues to grow, shipments of client storage devices have not declined significantly in quantity, but the flow has shifted from retail to OEM channels.
This trend is also consistent with the overall trend of the storage industry in the near future. NAND original manufacturers give priority to ensuring high-profit AI data center orders. Consumer-grade SSD prices have risen for several consecutive quarters. Retail sales will decline sharply in 2026. When DIY players cannot afford and cannot buy retail SSDs, PC machines have become the main outlet for storage chips.
