Monday, July 18th 2022
Hard Disk Drive Shipments Down by Over 30 Percent Year on Year
With only three major players left in the hard disk drive market-Seagate, Toshiba and WDC-the shipment of hard drives ought to be fairly stable, but demand is down across all manufacturers by anything from close to 30 percent to around 40 percent in the case of Toshiba. According to data from Trendfocus that was posted by Storage Newsletter, demand is down across all market segments or at best case flat compared to last year. Nearline enterprise drives remained flat at around 19 million units compared to last year, but performance enterprise storage is down to around 2.5 million units for the last quarter.
On the desktop and consumer electronics side of things, things are even more dire, with both 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch drive shipments dropping by 30 and 40 percent respectively. Around 13 million 3.5-inch hard drives and 11 million 2.5-inch drives were still shipped in Q2, but with lower demand for computers and more and more computers moving to SSDs, hard drives have been relegated to backup duties when it comes to most consumer purchases. Seagate was the company least affected by the drop in demand, but is still seeing close to a 30 percent drop in demand, with WDC second at over 30 percent and Toshiba, as mentioned, by maybe as much as 40 percent, which doesn't bode well for the company, as it's the smallest manufacturer of hard drives.
Source:
Storage Newsletter
On the desktop and consumer electronics side of things, things are even more dire, with both 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch drive shipments dropping by 30 and 40 percent respectively. Around 13 million 3.5-inch hard drives and 11 million 2.5-inch drives were still shipped in Q2, but with lower demand for computers and more and more computers moving to SSDs, hard drives have been relegated to backup duties when it comes to most consumer purchases. Seagate was the company least affected by the drop in demand, but is still seeing close to a 30 percent drop in demand, with WDC second at over 30 percent and Toshiba, as mentioned, by maybe as much as 40 percent, which doesn't bode well for the company, as it's the smallest manufacturer of hard drives.
31 Comments on Hard Disk Drive Shipments Down by Over 30 Percent Year on Year
blocksandfiles.com/2021/01/25/wikibon-ssds-vs-hard-drives-wrights-law/
Pandemic panic business sales have stymied the transition, but now it may start early; NAND downturns are usually seasonal!
www.newegg.ca/red-pro-wd2002ffsx-2tb/p/1Z4-0002-002R5?Description=2tb%20nas%20hdd&cm_re=2tb_nas%20hdd-_-1Z4-0002-002R5-_-Product
So reg price $140 CAD for 2TB and probably 150MB/s max transfer.
A 2TB SSD around reg $225 CAD for 500MB/s sata and 1500MB/s + on NVMe. 150MB/s is about 0.3x the speed of a sata SSD so it should be about 0.3x the price ($67.50 CAD), even less compared to NVMe!!
How does the old saying go, no bad products, just bad prices??
Hell, it's about time!
Also, water is wet!
Any Enterprise storage architect buying spinning rust for the "performance" tier should be shot without questioning, escorted to the back of the building and shot again, just to make sure. For the last half decade, there has been no acceptable excuse to buy anything other than an energy-efficient, slow, high-density hard drive. If you need performance, use tiered storage - it's dirt-cheap (or even free), ubiquitous and any solution - hardware or software - that's not offering tiered storage or caching belonged in the scrap heap as of around ten years ago. The level of performance you get from a 10K or 15K platter is absolutely pitiful compared to any kind of SSD. One low-performance, low-budget, consumer-grade NVMe drive like the old WD SN550 can absolutely decimate an entire 16-spindle 15K SAS array on a high-end controller for IOPS, latency, write speeds and potentially even sequential read throughput if the controller lacks enough RAM for a hefty read-cache.
So, there's a place for "slow" 7200 rpm SATA/SAS drives that use CMR and have all of the vibration sensors needed for rackmount storage, and then there's really nothing else based on rust that belongs anywhere in a new purchase. If a cheapo $400 consumer NAS can have an M.2 SSD cache, there's literally zero excuse for not having flash-cached disks at the enterprise level.Yeah, it was embarrassing - you'd think something that stupid would have been caught in testing or at least platform validation, right?
And, in the end of the day, the Toshiba deal still means they're one among many for flash supply (WD gets first pick from its own fabs,)
Good old times.
Says absolutely N.O.B.O.D.Y, hehehe :D
Having said that, at least we'll be well stocked in making wind chimes from the platters.
Its feasible to have a HQ SSD and HQ HDD though
Less HDD uptime = less failure HDD rates = less HDD replacement purchases. :) My guess.
It's true that in the high storage are it's cant compete with HDD at cost per GB but at the low end SSD's have all but killed HDD's. I mean who needs a 32GB HDD when you can get a much better 500GB SSD that is fraction of the size (M.2).
This 30% drop is most likely because CHIA dropped off.
I have a bunch of 2,5 Inch HHDs in USB enclosures to backup files. I'm not gonna do that on SSDs, as it's just not safe for long time.
Saying that I'm building a NAS at the moment and want some decent HDDs for backups - the price for a 14TB NAS HDD is about £140 which if I put in my PC would last me a very long time, whereas 10-15 years ago I'd fill up my drives every 1-2 years and need bigger ones.
However, nothing beats physical redundancies.