The rise of SSDs: A decline in PC demand and SSD adoption slowed hard drive shipments last quarter, a research says.
HDD shipments fell 15.4% quarter-to-quarter in Q2, with Toshiba unit sales down 17.3%.
Demand for most HDD segments declined by double-digit percentages over the time, save for performance-focused enterprise drives and nearline units.
Is The rise of SSDs, The end of HDD?
SSDs’ danger to the hard drive market has long been overblown. HDDs are slower, but the cost per capacity is lower, thus enterprises that store vast amounts of data still profit. Non-premium consumer electronics still use HDDs.
As SSDs grow quicker, cheaper, and more spacious, HDD use cases are shrinking.
Micron was the first company to ship 176-layer QLC NAND memory at scale, which might bring SSDs to cheap computers.
Microsoft plans to push PC makers to forsake HDD boot discs to improve Windows 11 hardware performance. The limitation applies just to boot drives, but dual-drive systems are rare. Therefore HDDs will be pushed to the PC margins.
New technologies are predicted to boost enterprise SSD capacity to 400TB, narrowing the cost-per-capacity gap with hard drives.
Increases in magnetic tape capacity (LTO-9 has a native capacity of 18TB) make the case for employing hard drives for archival purposes weaker.
Analysts say organisations are best served by a balanced storage stack of tape, HDDs, and SSDs, which should cover every use case economically, but the hard drive’s situation will only worsen.