Hard Disk Drive Shipments Down by Over 30 Percent Year on Year

[TheLostSwede]

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.



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[FreedomEclipse]

the whole SMR vs CMR drive thing doesnt help either. When WD started using SMR in their drives designed for NAS/Server use without telling anyone, they lost a lot of trust.

 

[defaultluser]

I always love it when ass hedgefund owners keep complaining about WDC owning sandisk, but when there is a general downturn on the entire HDD industry expected to continue indefinitely, you know that it was a good buy!

SSDs will crush hard drives in the enterprise, bearing down the full weight of Wright's Law – Blocks and Files

The supposed limitation of flash memory manufacturing capacity compared with hard disk drive manufacture is a “myth”, according to the Wikibon Research analyst David Floyer. More flash capacity is already made than HDD capacity. This volume production superiority is driving flash prices down...

blocksandfiles.com

Pandemic panic business sales have stymied the transition, but now it may start early; NAND downturns are usually seasonal!

 

[80251]

WD and Seagate both manufacture(?) SSD's so I'd guess they're hedging their bets. Isn't it true that at high capacities HDD's still can't be beat? It seems like the largest consumer SSD's are still 4 TiB and they're expensive.

 

[hat]

WD and Seagate both manufacture(?) SSD's so I'd guess they're hedging their bets. Isn't it true that at high capacities HDD's still can't be beat? It seems like the largest consumer SSD's are still 4 TiB and they're expensive.

Yes, HDDs are still very much in use where capacity is more important than speed, or by value conscious users (like me). Rather than buying a 2TB SSD for games storage, I put two 1TB HDDs in RAID0...

 

[mechtech]

Probably doesn't help that smaller versions don't really offer good value/money/performance.

WD Red Pro NAS Hard Drive Internal Hard Drive 2TB 3.5" - Newegg.com

Buy WD Red Pro NAS Hard Drive WD2002FFSX - Internal Hard Drive - 2 TB - 3.5" - SATA 6Gb/s - 7200 rpm - Buffer: 64 MB with fast shipping and top-rated customer service. Once you know, you Newegg!

www.newegg.ca

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??

 

[Zareek]

Probably doesn't help that smaller versions don't really offer good value/money/performance.

WD Red Pro NAS Hard Drive Internal Hard Drive 2TB 3.5" - Newegg.com

Buy WD Red Pro NAS Hard Drive WD2002FFSX - Internal Hard Drive - 2 TB - 3.5" - SATA 6Gb/s - 7200 rpm - Buffer: 64 MB with fast shipping and top-rated customer service. Once you know, you Newegg!

www.newegg.ca

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??

It does seem like HDD prices have gone kind of stagnant and consumer drive warranties have gotten shorter and shorter. I feel like 4 TB has been the best bang for your buck size for 5 years now. Even then, before that, it was 3 TB. Nothing like the old days when every year the bang for your buck drive would double in size and a 3-year warranty was the standard.

 

[Chrispy_]

Hard drive sales are down in the Enterprise Performance storage tier.

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.

the whole SMR vs CMR drive thing doesnt help either. When WD started using SMR in their drives designed for NAS/Server use without telling anyone, they lost a lot of trust.

Yeah, it was embarrassing - you'd think something that stupid would have been caught in testing or at least platform validation, right?

 

[defaultluser]

WD and Seagate both manufacture(?) SSD's so I'd guess they're hedging their bets. Isn't it true that at high capacities HDD's still can't be beat? It seems like the largest consumer SSD's are still 4 TiB and they're expensive.

yes, but has the world yet forgiven Sandforce for crap controllers? Sandisk has a much better history of reliable controllers!

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,)

 

[Assimilator]

Good riddance to spinning rust.

 

[Jism]

Good old times.

 

[Denver]

Probably because purchases tend to migrate to the high-capacity models that have emerged, reducing the total amount of units purchased over time.

 

[bonehead123]

Well, I'm soooooooooooo surprised....

Says absolutely N.O.B.O.D.Y, hehehe

 

[R-T-B]

yes, but has the world yet forgiven Sandforce for crap controllers?

I mean, I'd say most have forgotten rather than forgiven, but mostly yes. Consumers have short attention spans and care little about how it works, anyways.

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

If these companies are still counting on platter sales, they need a management change to come out of the Stone Age.

Having said that, at least we'll be well stocked in making wind chimes from the platters.

 

[zlobby]

If the Chia NFT fad holds up we are in for expensive HDD again.

 

[eidairaman1]

WD and Seagate both manufacture(?) SSD's so I'd guess they're hedging their bets. Isn't it true that at high capacities HDD's still can't be beat? It seems like the largest consumer SSD's are still 4 TiB and they're expensive.

Price, no.

Its feasible to have a HQ SSD and HQ HDD though

 

[MarsM4N]

Just looking at myself, the OS & daily data is on SSD's. Big data & backup files on HDD's, which I only fire up if needed.

Less HDD uptime = less failure HDD rates = less HDD replacement purchases. My guess.

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

Just looking at myself, the OS & daily data is on SSD's. Big data & backup files on HDD's, which I only fire up if needed.

Less HDD uptime = less failure HDD rates = less HDD replacement purchases. My guess.

Ahhh the old LESS is MORE discussion...

 

[Tomorrow]

WD and Seagate both manufacture(?) SSD's so I'd guess they're hedging their bets. Isn't it true that at high capacities HDD's still can't be beat? It seems like the largest consumer SSD's are still 4 TiB and they're expensive.

Largest consumer SSD's are 8TB actually and it's price has come down from 2000+ to a more manageable 700+. 16TB and 32TB in enterprise and in some cases there are some 100TB SSD's too.

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.

 

[TheDeeGee]

Yes, HDDs are still very much in use where capacity is more important than speed, or by value conscious users (like me). Rather than buying a 2TB SSD for games storage, I put two 1TB HDDs in RAID0...

Not to mention cold offline storage.

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.

 

[human_error]

No surprise to me - SSDs have become affordable enough to store anything that needs a decent read/write speed, and I have one 4TB HDD for media. I feel that hard drive storage space has outpaced increases in the data we store - we now put games on SSDs, so although they are getting bigger we don't really need HDDs to store many of them. That leaves photos and media - photo storage requirements haven't really grown, and many people store their photos on Google/Amazon/Apple clouds. With the increase in broadband speeds and popularity of streaming services again fewer people want/need hard drives to store film/TV to watch at home.

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.

 

[chrcoluk]

Nothing unusual here, the market will shrink until it hits a new normalised value as we transitioning from HDD only to HDD plus SSD, but the market wont vanish, as SSD's especially M.2 are not suitable for mass storage for consumers.

 

[A Computer Guy]

Just looking at myself, the OS & daily data is on SSD's. Big data & backup files on HDD's, which I only fire up if needed.

Less HDD uptime = less failure HDD rates = less HDD replacement purchases. My guess.

Don't forget about bit rot. Remember to keep multiple backups and if it's really important data keep enough copies to determine what copy is reliable when something goes wrong.

 

[zlobby]

Don't forget about bit rot. Remember to keep multiple backups and if it's really important data keep enough copies to determine what copy is reliable when something goes wrong.

There are already some scripts (some call them 'programs' but eh) that do a read-over (which supposedly) re-magnetizes the sectors.
However, nothing beats physical redundancies.