NAND flash feels instant, but it isn’t — and that gap is where the stutters come from.

Modern devices feel fast. Phones boot quickly. Files copy in seconds. Apps install while you’re barely paying attention. So it’s easy to assume that the memory underneath it all is operating at nanosecond speeds.

Here’s the quiet truth: NAND flash memory is fast compared to old hard drives, but slow compared to everything else in the system. And that mismatch is exactly why companies still spend time, money, and patent filings trying to shave milliseconds off storage behavior.

This article breaks down a recent NAND-related patent in plain English, explains why erase timing actually matters, and why a company like OPPO would bother protecting something that sounds so small on paper.

The basic NAND problem nobody talks about

NAND flash has a rule that makes engineers grumble: you can’t simply overwrite data. Before new data can be written, the memory has to be erased — and erase happens at the block level, not neatly at the file level.

That erase step is slow. Not “wait five minutes” slow, but slow enough that the rest of the system notices. When erase happens at the wrong time, everything pauses just long enough for humans to feel it.

This is where the trouble starts. If the system waits until the last moment to erase memory, writes stall. If it erases too aggressively, it wastes power and wears out the flash faster. Good storage behavior lives somewhere in the middle.

A quick reality check on timing

If you’ve built a PC, upgraded a laptop, or bought an SSD in the last twenty years, chances are you’ve run into the Crucial brand. For a long time, Crucial was the friendly, consumer-facing arm of Micron — a way for one of the world’s biggest memory manufacturers to sell directly to everyday users. So when news broke that Micron is winding down Crucial-branded consumer memory, it caught a lot of people off guard.

Here’s the important thing to understand up front: Micron is not exiting memory. They are exiting retail branding. That distinction matters, and it explains almost everything about what’s happening next.

From the outside, it looks like Micron is leaving — but it isn’t

Micron is a fully integrated memory manufacturer. They own wafer fabs. They design DRAM and NAND. They fabricate, test, package, and ship memory at massive scale. Unlike companies that simply buy chips and rebrand them, Micron controls the silicon itself. Because of that, they don’t need a consumer brand like Crucial to stay relevant in the market.

What Micron has decided to walk away from is the lowest-margin way of selling memory: boxed retail products competing on price, rebates, and shelf space. Crucial SSDs and RAM kits were sold into a brutally competitive consumer channel where margins are thin and volatility is constant. That model made sense when consumer PCs and laptops were the growth engine of the industry. That’s no longer the case.

The world Micron operates in today is driven by data centers, cloud infrastructure, enterprise storage, automotive systems, and — most importantly — artificial intelligence. Those customers don’t buy memory off a shelf. They sign long-term contracts. They buy in volume. And they pay a lot more per wafer.

What actually replaces Crucial in Micron’s world

Memory Apocalypse: How the Surge in AI Demand Is Rapidly Driving Up the Cost of PC RAM and SSD Storage

The so-called “memory apocalypse” is hitting the PC world like a bad hangover, and it’s showing up everywhere—from empty motherboard aisles to gamers quietly shelving their upgrade plans. Motherboard sales in key markets have fallen by as much as 50%, and the blame lands squarely on exploding DRAM prices. Enthusiasts who planned full new rigs are now downsizing or simply waiting it out because DDR5 kits that were around $79 not long ago are now pushing $140, while 64GB kits routinely sail past $250. Industry trackers show contract memory pricing climbing hard quarter over quarter, and NAND flash wafers used in SSDs are up sharply year over year, pushing SSD prices 20–30% higher and taking the fun right out of “I’ll just add more storage.”

Underneath all this, the villain wearing the expensive suit is AI. Training massive language models, recommendation engines, image generators, and all the other buzzword machines takes a stupid amount of memory. We’re not talking about a couple of DIMMs in a gamer box; we’re talking about racks of servers loaded with high-density DRAM and stacked with ultra-fast NAND-based storage. Nvidia GPU clusters need mountains of memory to keep those accelerators fed, and hyperscale players like Microsoft, Anthropic, and every cloud provider with an AI slide deck are placing orders measured in tens or hundreds of thousands of high-capacity modules. That demand doesn’t just nudge the market—it steamrolls it.

When Samsung and SK Hynix look at that firehose of data center demand, they don’t rush to flood the market with cheap chips. Instead, they “optimize capacity” and “minimize oversupply,” which is corporate-speak for keeping the supply tight and the margins fat. The same logic slams into NAND: AI workloads chew through enormous SSD farms for training data, checkpoints, and logs, so TLC and QLC wafers get bid up before consumer drives ever see them. The end result is simple: data centers get first dibs, and the rest of us pay what’s left over. That’s how you end up with SSDs that cost more this year than last, even when nothing about your gaming rig got any smarter.

The domino effect is brutal. When RAM gets too expensive, nobody buys motherboards. When motherboards sit on shelves, CPU sales stall. GPU deals suddenly don’t look like deals at all, and gamers end up spending their money on cheaper toys like mice, keyboards, and new monitors because at least those don’t require a second mortgage. Even Black Friday couldn’t disguise the mess, with GPU and memory pricing mostly shrugging at the idea of “sale season.” If the current forecasts hold, this memory crunch could stretch into 2028, leaving PC builders tiptoeing around upgrades and nursing a long, ugly DRAM and NAND hangover while the AI giants happily drain the global supply.

Rising Memory Costs Across DDR5, NAND, and Contract Markets

This chart shows (Q4 – 2025) how memory prices have surged across the board, with DDR5 32GB and 64GB kits climbing the fastest over the past several months. Industry contract pricing has also moved upward, including DRAMeXchange’s Memory Contract Index and TLC NAND wafer prices. Together, these trends highlight broad market pressure driven largely by soaring AI demand, supply tightening, and renewed data center spending.