Warning about buying lesser-known SSD and RAM brands in South Africa

Luis

Luis

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Warning about buying lesser-known SSD and RAM brands in South Africa

Syntech CEO Craig Nowitz has warned South Africans to stay away from lesser-known SSD and RAM brands, as some have resorted to using secondhand chips amid the global memory crunch.

Demand for cutting-edge memory products has surged since the second half of 2025 due to increased adoption of artificial intelligence (AI), which requires significant processing power and storage.
 
Most of the ram in the world generally comes from Samsung/Hynix 70%, Micron 20%.
on
Many brands like Kingston, Adata, Apacer, Corsair, and so on gets these chips from these providers, with some Chinese the exception as they started to manufacture their own and some are really good. They may tend to use CXMT which is a Chinese company thats trying to fill the Gap where Micron has pulled out of the market (Corsair).

Samsung and Hynix, knowing this did what they tend to do, since they now control the market fully and Micron is out, they fixed ram pricing at a much higher rate for better profits. They went to court for the most recent price fixing, but the case was thrown out as there is no real conclusive proof, but it all points that way.

And yes Ai data centres now buy out 50% of their chips, so selling it for 3x the price actually makes sense.

And if you look at Profits? Samsung Profits shot up about 200% year on year for their microchip business, and Hynix well went up 100%, so doubled.
 
Corelli said:
Most of the ram in the world generally comes from Samsung/Hynix 70%, Micron 20%.
on
Many brands like Kingston, Adata, Apacer, Corsair, and so on gets these chips from these providers, with some Chinese the exception as they started to manufacture their own and some are really good
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It's not about that, it's about the "brands" popping up that nobody has ever heard of with names like "Super Extreme" or "Premier Storage" (or whatever, making stuff up). I've bumped into a few people who have symptoms that perfectly match extremely worn NAND, such as the drive working (retaining data all the way to capacity, including through power cycles) but struggling to pass 20-30MB/s.
 
JerryMungo said:
Even bigger warning - buying from Takealot:
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They just pass the cost to the seller.

Takealot really needs to get better control of metadata. its why you have 20 sellers selling the same thing as separate product listings, instead of 1 product listing with 20 sellers. This sort of price difference vs the market is an instant red flag.

These product all have unique GTIN numbers, so there is no excuse except for lazyness
 
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