News Sales of HDDs Drop 35% Year-over-Year: 34 Million Units in Q1

[Admin]

Unit shipments of nearline drives suffer the most in the first quarter as exascalers remain cautious.

Sales of HDDs Drop 35% Year-over-Year: 34 Million Units in Q1 : Read more

 

[kyzarvs]

A 256GB boot SSD is less than £15, might be worth the saving to get the boot times to something acceptable - W10 seems to have done a number on people wanting to hang on to 'spinners as boot drives. Though as I have two NAS devices here running chunky spinners, I can well appreciate the slow-but-large advantages,

 

[sitehostplus]

Question.

Does this mean SSD's are eating into HDD sales, or are people avoiding HDD"s and SSD's altogether?

 

[BX4096]

Question.

Does this mean SSD's are eating into HDD sales, or are people avoiding HDD"s and SSD's altogether?

It's largely the former, but I also don't see that many people still having the data hoarder mentality of the recent past. With online streaming, gaming platforms, gigabit internet, and so on, fewer and fewer people still keep massive numbers of big files on their drives.

I've always preferred to have the stuff I own at hand and not on some nebulous "cloud" that can disappear at our benevolent corporate overlords' moment's notice, but I definitely belong to a rapidly shrinking minority of "old-school" computer users. The newer generation seems to have no problem keeping everything on some other people's remote computers, from their games and movies to their porn collections, personal videos, and so on.

 

[lmcnabney]

I would add some more storage, but I don't need to yet. The last drive I added was about 2.5 years ago and that was a 10TB drive for $160. I just checked pricing and the best price I could find for SATA is $185 - so prices are obviously still too high. When you factor how fast SSDs have plummeted buying spinning rust seems like a ripoff.

 

[sitehostplus]

It's largely the former, but I also don't see that many people still having the data hoarder mentality of the recent past. With online streaming, gaming platforms, gigabit internet, and so on, fewer and fewer people still keep massive numbers of big files on their drives.

I've always preferred to have the stuff I own at hand and not on some nebulous "cloud" that can disappear at our benevolent corporate overlords' moment's notice, but I definitely belong to a rapidly shrinking minority of "old-school" computer users. The newer generation seems to have no problem keeping everything on some other people's remote computers, from their games and movies to their porn collections, personal videos, and so on.

Ok, so advancing tech (in this case SSD's) is causing HDD sales to decline.

Thanks for that little tidbit. 🤗

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

I still think Optane or 3D Phase Change Memory, Quant-X or whatever they want to call it, would be the perfect Solid State Memory to use as a cache for HDD's.

 

[DSzymborski]

It's largely the former, but I also don't see that many people still having the data hoarder mentality of the recent past. With online streaming, gaming platforms, gigabit internet, and so on, fewer and fewer people still keep massive numbers of big files on their drives.

I've always preferred to have the stuff I own at hand and not on some nebulous "cloud" that can disappear at our benevolent corporate overlords' moment's notice, but I definitely belong to a rapidly shrinking minority of "old-school" computer users. The newer generation seems to have no problem keeping everything on some other people's remote computers, from their games and movies to their porn collections, personal videos, and so on.

You know, you can do both. And should. Like beer and tacos, it's not a mutually exclusive decision and you're best off choosing both.

 

[watzupken]

As SSD prices drop, it will obviously impact the sales of HDD. HDD in the first place is very rarely used in laptops nowadays, but with prices of SSD dropping, there is less reason to pair SSD with a HDD in a retail PC/ laptop.

 

[Hooda Thunkett]

I'm still trying to make the math in that chart work...so, laptop HDDs dropped 33% from 24.9 million units to 10 million units...which is less than half....

 

[TerryLaze]

I've always preferred to have the stuff I own at hand and not on some nebulous "cloud" that can disappear at our benevolent corporate overlords' moment's notice, but I definitely belong to a rapidly shrinking minority of "old-school" computer users. The newer generation seems to have no problem keeping everything on some other people's remote computers, from their games and movies to their porn collections, personal videos, and so on.

The big issue with that is that you need to have backups (plural) of of all of that data because disks can just stop working from one moment to the next.
And not many people have the discipline or just the will to bother with all that work.
If you have it in the could it automatically is in many copies and places at once.
I stopped hoarding data for these reasons anyway.

In other words, ditto!

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Sadly I don't see SSD prices dropping much in the near future between price fixing collusion production cuts and the desire to keep a price premium on drives of more than 2TB for as long as possible.

I do agree that exascale datacenters and cloud servers will continue to experience increased demand as reliable high speed and broadband wireless services continue to expand. Much like GPUs the consumer market is a drop in the bucket compared to enterprise applications, and enterprise applications can afford to pay the price premiums on 4TB+ SSDs to keep prices high.

 

[einheriar]

Wish the NAS disks get a bit cheaper, as buying 5 NAS drives for a TrueNAS server is quite the expense for my home lab.
. Needless to say that NAS drives are the ones that will remain as the other standard drives will be replaced by ssd based drives in the vast majority of desktops and laptops.

 

[DSzymborski]

Sadly I don't see SSD prices dropping much in the near future between price fixing collusion production cuts and the desire to keep a price premium on drives of more than 2TB for as long as possible.

SSDs have regularly come down in price for as long as they've existed. Why are they suddenly going to start colluding with each other now as opposed to any other time?

SSD Prices Have Fallen 15 to 30 Percent Since January

Declining Flash memory prices have lead to great savings.

www.tomshardware.com