This conclusion has taken place after the annual meeting of the hard disk association in Japan, which after that meeting have published a report with very interesting facts about the market which we immediately comment and analyze. It is worth mentioning that the data is based on the market trend since we are obviously still at the beginning of 2020, and in fact they do not even have sales data for all of 2019.
SSD sales do not stop growing
It is a fact that the market trend is to gradually abandon traditional hard drives in pursuit of SSDs. As you know, they are much faster, they heat up and consume less, and today their price already allows to have 1 TB capacities without spending too much money, so the slow and archaic mechanical hard drives are losing more and more ground, at least in the domestic sphere because it is undeniable that for companies and data centers its large capacity and price ratio per GB remains higher.
Similarly, even in the business environment more and more SSDs are used, and not only to create SSD cache but also as storage units for critical servers where enormous speed is needed.
In any case, the forecast is that SSD sales during this year exceed 280 million units, surpassing for the first time in history the sales of normal hard drives. Hard disk sales have been falling for 5 years, while SSD sales do not stop growing (39% in the last year).
The price per GB of SSDs, the key to its success
When the SSDs arrived on the market, the first units were excessively expensive and unreachable for the foot user. A 32 GB SSD with SATA 2 interface (not even SATA 3) cost more than 100 euros. Today for that same price you have SSD drives of 1 TB capacity, with SATA 3 interface and with much greater durability, denoting that the price per GB of these units has improved, and the trend of course is to keep improving.
We will see interesting data in the graphs and tables above:
- Right now SSDs already give much more benefit than hard drives.
- The maximum capacity of SSDs has been increasing, but much more slowly, even speaking of proportions, than that of hard drives.
- The cost per GB of SSDs has dropped a lot, and with a much lower trend than hard drives.
According to this last data, they have not talked about whether there will come a time when the price per GB of SSDs is lower than that of hard drives, a situation that if doubt would be the trigger for the almost total disappearance of the latter.
