(Image credit: Tom's Hardware) As memory makers prioritize shipments of their products to the AI sector, prices of solid-state drives for consumer applications increased significantly over the last few quarters, which naturally caused retail sales of SSDs to drop significantly in 2026. Nelson Duann, a vice president at Silicon Motion, one of the largest SSD controller makers in the world, said in an interview with Tom's Hardware at Computex 2026 that the retail drive market had almost disappeared in the first half of 2026. Nonetheless, the company still sold plenty of SSD controllers to module makers (the companies that make the finished SSDs), but those devices primarily went to PC OEMs. "The retail SSD market has almost disappeared," Duann told us during the interview . "The controllers we sell to module makers are now largely ending up in SSDs that are shipped to PC OEMs.…