Sales of mechanical hard drives or HDD drop significantly, due to increased capacity and lower price of SSDs.
Mechanical hard drives or HDDs are in the doldrums, above all, due to the increase in capacity and fall in price of SSDs. In addition, SSDs also offer higher read and write speeds than HDDs. This is leading to the fact that mechanical hard drives are falling in sales significantly. Especially in the consumer market is where HDDs are more displaced, since they are still consumed a lot in professional systems.
Sales of mechanical hard drives drop significantly
The new 96-layer QLC memory increases the capacity of the SSDs and reduces the price. Although HDDs have also increased in capacity, they have the trade-off that the read and write speeds are very low. As long as we compare them with SSDs, of course.
Although HDDs are popular in servers and data centers, sales of these units are falling. This is causing the sale of HDD to fall in general, falling by 11.6% during the first quarter of 2019. It is not the first fall and it is that already in Q4 2018 sales fell by 12.9%, something that makes clear the trend of market.
According to the data, during Q1 2019 a total of 24.5 million units were distributed. This represents a drop of more than 4 million units compared to Q4 2018. Above all, the fall in veins has to do with the 2.5 ”units, intended for portable equipment. They have dropped by 6 million laptop drives, due to the entry of SSDs. It was only a matter of time before mechanical hard drives came to an end.
| Manufacturer | HDDs shipped (in millions) | Q4 2018 vs. Q1 2019 | Q1 2018 vs. Q1 2019 | Market share |
| Seagate | 31,40 - 31,80 | -14,5% / -13,4% | -14,4% / -13,4% | 41,0% - 40,9% |
| Toshiba | 18,30 - 18,70 | -13,3% / -11,4% | -11,3% / -9,3% | 23,9% - 24,0% |
| WDC | 26,90 - 27,30 | -10,8% / -9,5% | -26,1% / -25,0% | 35,1% - 35,1% |
| TOTAL | 76.60 - 77.80 | -12,9% / -11,6% | -18,3% / -17,0% | 100% - 100% |
