Hard Drive Shipments Expected to Drop Nearly 50 Percent YoY in 2019

[btarunr]

With solid-state drives (SSDs) entering value and mainstream price segments, and the transition in consumers' data-storage behavior from local storage to the cloud, there is expected to be a dramatic fall in shipments of hard disk drives (HDDs) in 2019. Japanese company Nidec, which manufactures nearly 85% of all DC motors for use in HDDs across the industry, estimates a nearly 50 percent drop in HDD shipments for 2019. Since these motors are specifically designed for use in HDDs, it is directly proportional to new HDD shipments, thus presenting a reliable outlook of the HDD industry itself. The DC motor inside HDDs is a non user-replaceable component as detaching it involves opening the seal of the disk chamber, thereby contaminating it.

In 2010, Nidec shipped nearly 650 million motors, which dropped significantly down to 375 million motors in 2018, indicating the sharp decline in the HDD industry. While Nidec will ship as few as 290 million motors in 2019, it estimates shipments of HDDs to go down by nearly 50 percent year-over-year (YoY). Data centers are swallowing up large volumes of high-capacity (>10 TB) HDDs for warm- and cold-storage even as SSDs and DRAM are sought for hot-storage. The client-segment, however, is now firmly captivated with SSDs, with even mainstream laptops packing SSDs. Prominent HDD manufacturers Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba, have each invested heavily in building up SSD product lines, and specializing their HDD portfolio for enterprise and quasi-enterprise (eg: NAS, NVR, high-uptime client) markets.



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[kastriot]

This is how technology advancement works HHD crossfades out and SSD crossfades in

 

[Deleted member 24505]

Will data centers still use HDD's? Imagine the cost of switching them to all SSD

 

[Flyordie]

Yea, HDDs will still be needed. HDDs will not go away for at least another 15-20 years at least.

 

[xtreemchaos]

time marches on, i for one think this is good news, ssds are much better for the planet.

 

[Wavetrex]

Call me when I can buy a 10TB SSD that is cheaper than 200 Euro, the price I paid to Amazon last week for a WD Mybook of that capacity.

Obviously HDDs won't go away as long as they are (much) cheaper than SSD's for the same capacity.
Small drives however are disappearing, indeed (like 1TB already completely pointless)

 

[s3thra]

Yea, HDDs will still be needed. HDDs will not go away for at least another 15-20 years at least.

I've started buying 8TB drives to fill up with multimedia files and backups - these seem to be coming down to a reasonable price these days. So I would definitely agree that HDDs will still be needed at least for the foreseeable future for me as I rely on them every day.

time marches on, i for one think this is good news, ssds are much better for the planet.

It would be interesting to see what kinds of earth resources go into manufacturing HDDs vs SSDs. Certainly I think SSDs have HHDs beat on the power consumption side of things.

 

[EarthDog]

Will data centers still use HDD's? Imagine the cost of switching them to all SSD

Yes...until the cost /GB is a closer to SSD.

 

[bonehead123]

Good riddance IMHO, I'm soooo tired of loud, spinning, failing-too-soon rust buckets, bring on the super-cheap, super-sized SSD's, especially M.2's !

 

[yotano211]

I just bought 2 2tb ssd for 140 each but I can get a 2tb spinner for 30 bucks. I am rather cheap so I usually take the cheaper route.

 

[Deleted member 158293]

Raid NVME sticks for stations & 8TB min. HD for bulk storage, 16TB & 20TB can't come soon enough. 4K HDR video takes a lot of room.

 

[Vayra86]

Still not quite there yet to ditch all of the HDDs price/GB wise, but getting closer every day. I think I'll just be running them into the ground after all at this pace

 

[micropage7]

like expected before, ssd now is cheaper than before but there a long way to go since $/Gb it still more expensive from hdd

 

[27MaD]

PS5.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Will data centers still use HDD's? Imagine the cost of switching them to all SSD

Yes. SSDs are taking over in the consumer space. HDDs will continue to dominate in enterprise/bulk storage.

I'm surprised they think externals will continue to use HDDs. I looked at the prices for 2.5" HDDs and they're rubbish.

 

[EarthDog]

and they're rubbish.

Worse than SSDs or still better ($/GB)?

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Better $/GB. 1TB for $45 USD. But that's a 5400 RPM drive. Performance is terrible and price is not attractive compared to 3.5" drives.

I get the impression SSDs killed the 2.5" hard drive... Then again, look at that graph: external drives are #1 and externals mostly use 2.5" HDDs, yeah?

Data Center is the only market they're expecting HDD growth in...that makes sense.

 

[Eskimonster]

M.2 nvme is so good , that u cannot not use it, specially since storage space usually is a bottle neck.

 

[Deleted member 24505]

I use a m2 for boot, but still spinners for storage, i still cannot really afford to replace them with ssd's

 

[Monberg75]

As mining by HDD is increasing, i doubt that the HDD sale will decrease over the next period.

HDD mining is a fact, and a green way to mine instead of mining by GPU. So I see the sale increase from now on.