HDDs have been falling in sales for ten years, mainly because of SSDs

Ten consecutive years of falling sales of mechanical hard drives, caused by the increase in the capacity of these and SSDs.

New 96-layer TLC memories and QLC memories for SSDs are making it possible to significantly increase capacity while reducing power consumption. This is causing the sale of hard drives to decline. Since 2010 the number of units has been decreasing significantly. As we can see, the data dates back to 1976 and reached highs in 2010, although in 2014 they increased again, it was somewhat anecdotal. In 2010 the number of HDDs sold worldwide was more than 9.000 million units.

The rise of SSDs as the main factor

It also stands out that in 2001 there was a small decrease in the sale of hard drives, caused by the global economic crisis. Subsequently, everything has been falling, except in 2014 with the only rebound that we have discussed. As an anecdote, the first hard drive was the IBM 305 Ramac, developed in 1956. This hard drive had a capacity of 4.4MB on 50 24-inch drives with a unit price of $ 50.000.

The reason for this recession in sales is quite varied. The main one is the popularization of SSD drives and the other factor is that hard drives have more and more capacity. Seagate recently released the HAMR roadmap. The company aims to reach 48TB of capacity by 2023. Also, using this technology, in two years they hope to reach a capacity of 100TB per hard disk drive, which is amazing.

It should be noted that currently the capacity of SSDs is behind HDDs, also in terms of price per GB. SSDs are rapidly increasing in capacity and prices are falling dramatically. It should be noted that solid state drives are also vastly faster than mechano drives.

Source: StorageNewsletter