Expect that in the short and surely medium term, mechanical hard drives will continue to exist as the capabilities they provide are not yet possible on SSDs. Obviously almost nobody needs 20 TB of storage at home level (unless you have a fairly powerful home NAS), but companies still need large amounts of data storage, so traditional disks will continue to dominate there, although this would be a segment of almost marginal market.
Record sales drop 13%
According to the latest hard drive sales report released by TrendFocus for the first quarter of 2020, global hard drive sales have fallen 13% on average from last year, and 14% from the previous quarter. Quarter by quarter sales do not stop falling, and market analysts are concerned that, if this trend continues, There will come a time when they will no longer be profitable for manufacturers.
Not all types of hard drives sell less. As we said before, the business sector is currently its strong point, and sales are increasing despite the trend, in total with 15.7 million hard drives. However, in other areas the trend is down: the shipment of 3.5-inch disks was 23 million, 20% less, while in total 24 million 2.5-inch hard disks were sold, also 20% less (and among all that it makes that average of -13%).
According to analysts, of course the Coronavirus is one of the causes of low sales, as well as the fact that next generation consoles (Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5) will use SSDs, something that will greatly affect sales of 2.5-inch hard drives. In any case, the consoles and the Coronavirus cannot be blamed for the downward trend of the previous quarters.
The future of hard drives
Absolutely no one has any doubt that long-term traditional hard drives will eventually disappear in favor of SSDs. These are far superior in performance, do not heat up, are quiet, and are no longer too far from providing enough storage capacities to do so, although their price per GB is still substantially higher.
For this reason, analysts predict that in the not too distant future traditional hard drives are destined to end up disappearing. The time will come when manufacturers like Seagate, Toshiba or WDC determine that it is no longer profitable to continue manufacturing These types of storage units will cease to do so, although they will very likely continue to serve companies for a certain period of time.
In any case, for that turning point in the industry to arrive, there is still a long time to go, and for it to arrive first, the SSDs will have to be able to provide the same capacities that hard drives now provide, and with a similar price level, since that as we said before, they still have a much higher price per GB.
