Hard drives are slowly dying, being replaced slowly but surely by their successors, SSDs. The sales numbers don’t lie. Combining the results of Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital, the market has collapsed by 34% in just one year. The fall in memory prices has something to do with it.
It’s hard to say we didn’t see it happen. When SSDs hit the market, they were too expensive and just too new to appeal to the mainstream. But as things progress, they are gradually taking precedence over their neighbors, hard drives, which have been firmly established for decades. But we have to face the facts: if HDDs have the advantage of storage capacity, this is their only argument against SSDs.
Indeed, it is now accepted by the majority that SSDs are much more reliable than hard drives, which fail much less on average. What’s more, they no longer suffer from a price that is too high for ordinary mortals. After the fall in memory prices in 2021, SSDs are as good a storage solution as their peers. If not better, because much faster and more compact.
Hard drives no longer sell, make way for SSDs
All this leads to the obvious. 2022 will certainly mark the fall of hard drives, or at least the beginning of the end for our old companions. According to a recent report by Storage Newsletter, the observation is already there: on average, 35% fewer hard drives were sold in 2022 than the previous year at the same time. This figure combines the results of Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital, the three market giants.
Related: Google and Seagate’s AI Can Tell If a Hard Drive Is About to Fail
It was Toshiba that posted the heaviest loss, with a drop between 38.5% and 42.8% in just one year. While manufacturers posted 162 million units sold in the first quarter of 2010, they are now content with 45 million copies sold. The rest of the sector is not mistaken. The transition is already underway, especially at Microsoft, which wants Windows to be installed exclusively on SSDs by next year.
Source : Storage Newsletter
