Magnetic disks have been with us since the dawn of the PC era. From the moment it became clear that tape drives did not meet the requirements for everyday use and neither did floppy disks. However, for some time now, this technology has already given everything it had to give and in a slow, but incessant process, NVMe SSD storage systems are eating up the market. The result? There are fewer and fewer sales of this component. doHard drives are doomed to disappear?
The world we live in is one of pure destruction, nothing stays forever and as soon as a new technology appears capable of doing this task, but better, the old one disappears. Of course, the surrogate is not perfect, and there is always some performance value where it is worse, allowing it to survive for a while. In the tube screens it was its greater capacity for contrast and color representation, in digital photography its image quality was worse for a long time compared to film. On hard drives? The data capacity they can store.
Could hard drives disappear from stores?
We know that a very bold statement, but if we look at the trend it is very clear that there are several elements that make us think that what has been the quintessential storage unit for decades could have its days numbered. So it would be added to the trash can of history along with many other technologies of the same type and that nobody uses today.
The reasons why the hard drive might disappear are as follows:
- Solid state drives are better when it comes to data access. Both in response speed and data transfer. Also, the hard drive cannot take advantage of the high bandwidth of certain interfaces.
- For some time now we do not see laptops, whatever they are, with hard drives as standard.
- Microsoft’s announcement stating that from a certain point it will be impossible to start Windows from a conventional hard drive.
- It is the only component that at the moment justifies the SATA ports.
However, nothing indicates that hard drives could disappear, since after all we can see them in stores. Of course, this is nothing more than a mirage and the reality is that the demand for them is decreasing. As you can see in the table below these lines, sales have fallen by an average of 30% from one year to the next. That is, public demand for these devices is falling.
| Seller | distributed units | Quarterly variation | Annual variation | Market share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seagate | 19.8 to 20.6 million | -10.4% /-13.8% | -26.9%/-29.7% | 44.3%/44.7% |
| Toshiba | 8 to 8.6 million | -14.3%/-20.2% | -38.5%/-42.8% | 18.5%/18.1% |
| WDC | 16.5 to 17.3 million | -12.4%/-16.5% | -31.4%/-34.6% | 37.2% |
| all combined | 44.3 to 46.5 million | -11.9%/-16% | -31%/-34.2% |
When will the phenomenon occur?
If we are honest, we do not believe that hard drives will disappear, but we will see them appear in the form of units for data recovery or to store large volumes of information for a low price. For the vast majority of the public, the larger the data storage capacity of a drive, the less useful it is. In other words, the point is reached where the extra storage is not used and becomes more of an extra cost than anything else.
At the moment, NVMe SSDs are fair in terms of storage capacity and that is why HDDs continue to be consumed. However, there will come a point where solid-state drives will be good enough for everyone, and that’s when the hard drive might disappear. Although not completely, but be limited to a certain audience in particular. The consequences of it? Well, easy to predict, a lower demand also means an increase in prices and it will reach the point where they will be more expensive for the ordinary user.
