Western Digital said it expects to start shipping consumer SanDisk products using the chips later this year. The firm still has a partnership with Tohiba despite the latter's acquisition by Bain Capital, a consortium that includes Apple, Dell, Seagate and Kingston.

Despite constantly improving NAND flash tech, prices for SSDs and memory cards had been rising until recently because of a shortage of chips. They're reportedly falling again because of lower demand for PCs, smartphones and cryto-mining equipment. That's great news for consumers, so hopefully Toshiba's new higher-capacity, faster chips will keep that trend going.