Reality is harsh and many times time puts everyone in their place and we do not say this to fill space on your screen, but due to the fact that the disappearance of hard drives is going to be a reality very soon. And we are not talking about a wish of ours, nor about speculation, but about consumer trends that mean that less and less of these storage units are purchased.
Hard drives have been with our PCs since they came standard with the PC XT and have become the longest-lived persistent storage unit. Not only has it lived with floppy disk drives, but it has lived with optical disks and even shared space in the world of content distribution over the Internet. However, in the end its technical limitations weigh more and more and it has become the biggest bottleneck in terms of performance. With game consoles ditching SSDs and laptops, the sword of Damocles is also hanging over the head of hard drives.
The figures of the disappearance of hard drives
Facta non verba, said Virgilio. That is why we are going to talk to you with data in hand about the disappearance of hard drives and that is that their sales have been reduced by half from 2021 to 2022. And we are not saying it, but a report by TrendForce in which they talk about the fact that the market for magnetic disks for computers has literally collapsed. And it is that brands as important as Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital have reduced their shipments from the factory by 42.5%. In other words, from one year to the next, half of these storage units have been consumed.
However, these drives are not only sold for PCs and another factor for the disappearance of hard drives is that demand has also dropped from the world of servers, and especially from storage service providers in the cloud. The motivation behind it? 512GB SSDs have already matched hard drives of the same capacity in costmaking it pointless to mount them on many systems.
So much so that 92% of laptops sold this year come with a standard SSD as storage, leaving only 8% of the market for those with hard drives. In 2023? It will be worse, since the percentages will be 96% and 4% and it does not seem that the trend will subside in the coming years. So the trend is none other than the disappearance of hard drives.
Little by little they are raising their price
We already told you at the time that the cheapest SSD is cheaper than the lowest cost hard drive. However, one of the things that will do the most damage to HDDs is none other than their low demand will force prices to rise, if they are not already doing so, breaking the price advantage per gig of storage. The only thing left for them is to move forward, or rather upwards, and offer units with storage capacity in tens of terabytes, something that the home user does not need.
