HDD Shipments Down 18% YoY

[poochyena]

https://www.storagenewsletter.com/2019/04/17/ww-hdd-shipments-down-to-around-77-million-in-1q19-trendfocus/

 

Preliminaty CQ1 ’19 Results:
HDD Shipments Down to Around 77 Million
With Nearline Units,  Exabytes Rising on Initial Cloud Recovery

· 3.5″ Desktop/CE HDDs: Total desktop/CE HDD shipments (including 3.5″ external HDDs) dropped nearly four million units from the prior quarter to around 24.5 million HDDs on seasonally
lower desktop PC sales.
· 2.5″ Mobile/CE HDDs: Seasonally weaker notebook PC shipments, higher SSD attach rates and typically lower CQ1 demand for 2.5″ CE HDDs cut total 2.5″ mobile/CE shipments by more than six million units sequentially to around 37 million units.
· 3.5″/2.5″ Enterprise HDDs: Nearline HDDs rebounded by nearly one million units Q/Q to around 11.5 million HDDs on increased demand by a couple of hyperscale companies. Early
nearline capacity shipment estimates indicate a sharp rise from 73EB in CQ4 ’18 to as high as 88EB in CQ1 ’19. Seasonally weaker demand by enterprise IT systems vendors.

 

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I see HDDs going the same way as tape drives as just being very niche for people with extremely large amount of cold data.  ~250GB SSDs are now cheap enough to where budget laptops are using them as their only drive, and thats enough space for casual users. Even more demanding users don't use more than around 1 TB of storage. There is little reason to upgrade storage, especially to a hdd when a 1tb ssd only costs around $110. Space is less of a concern, its all about speed now.

[Taf the Ghost]

SSD Price/Gb dropped nearly in half during 2018. You can get good quality (with DRAM) 500 Gb SSDs for under 50USD (on sale).  This trend should continue. Hard Metal was great, but we're on to new things.

[Doobeedoo]

Quite expected. Most don't need multi TB storage and SSDs have come down in price a lot. Even 1TB can be found for very cheap. 

[Stefan Payne]

14 hours ago, poochyena said:

I see HDDs going the same way as tape drives as just being very niche for people with extremely large amount of cold data. 

Right now we have a 4:1 ratio of capacity for the same amount of money, if we talk about cheap products on all sides.

 

That is really not that much no more. The HDD Manufacturers need to increase their game and innovate, increse the capacity for the price.

In the last 10 years or so, it just doubled for the same amount of money. That's not that great at all for that timeframe...

 

Quote

Even more demanding users don't use more than around 1 TB of storage.

Decent 1TB SSDs are at around 100€ right now.

 

Quote

There is little reason to upgrade storage, especially to a hdd when a 1tb ssd only costs around $110. Space is less of a concern, its all about speed now.

Naa, I disagree.

There is still a reason for magnetic drives, especially if you want to store some not performance relevant things - like your holliday movies and pictures.

 

But yeah, the Problem is that the HDD Manufacturers didn't do much in the last 10 years...

 

There isn't much difference in performance from my 1TB/7200rpm Samsung Spinpoint to modern ones.

My two 1TB Samsung in RAID0 are a bit faster than modern lower end Drives but not by much...

[RejZoR]

They would still sell if people would even know about hybrid storage via SSD caching. But it's kinda expected, I haven't bought a HDD for last 8 years or so. All devices on SSD since I replaced HDD with SSD in my ACER Aspire One with Atom N270 processor. Yeah, that was single core with HT netbook. Do the math how far in the past that is (N270 was released in 2008).

[Curious Pineapple]

Maybe we're at a point where mechanical drives can't really get any faster. Theres a limit to how fast an actuator can move, how fast it can move and stop in the correct place, and how fine it's movements can be. More platters and being clever with where data is physically stored helps, but realistically SSD's are at the point of being cheap enough to throw in any machine (my first 1TB Caviar black cost more than a 1TB SSD does today). High capacity systems use RAID to increase throughput and have caching to speed up the most accessed data in RAM and also SSD caching.

[RejZoR]

There are new WD drives with dual actuator, but they still can't come anywhere near SSD drives. SSD simply has no physical limitations since all communication is basically at the speed of electricity and/or response times that NAND or SSD controller are capable of doing. Which will always be faster than any mechanism that has to travel 2cm of distance and do that repeatedly for nearly every data access. HDD with SSD caching works super well though. It gives you HDD capacity at near speed of SSD for daily use at minimum price premium of roughly 60€ (30 for SSD and 30 for caching software)

[GoldenLag]

with the exception of large ammounts of data and the need for super cheap high capacity i dont see a reason to get a HDD these days. 

 

SSDs are must anyways in a system, why not pick up a large one while you are at it and skip harddrives

[JustWantTech]

Untill SSD can have on par prices with HDD for the same space so you can have a vault of data or for you to store 100 games from steam, HDD will be here to stay even if the demand is low for general consumer except enterprise.

[Mihle]

For me, HDD is still useful but there is less point of them than before, so ofc it has gone down. For normal people, just an SSD is probably enough .

My desktop will still be SSD + HDD. At least as long as I do not have a NAS, and then maybe only the NAS will have HDDs, I don't know yet.

[poochyena]

1 hour ago, GoldenLag said:

SSDs are must anyways in a system

I agree. I don't care how cheap of a PC someone is building, I'll tell them to get an SSD. It doesn't add that much more to the overall system cost, and system responsiveness is just night and day.

 

2 hours ago, Stefan Payne said:

There isn't much difference in performance from my 1TB/7200rpm Samsung Spinpoint to modern ones.

Yep. I'm still using a ~282GB 9 year old laptop hdd to store backup data. No reason to upgrade it if it still works, and when it does fail, i'd probably just get a small ssd.

[dfsdfgfkjsefoiqzemnd]

I'm not surprised.  HDDs have their place, but that place is not in most consumers' homes.

 

I consider HDDs useful for mass storage (several TB) and backup/archival purposes.  Everything else here is on SSD only. 

I'm really considering doing the mass storage on SSDs too.  It sure would quiet down my NAS.   At that point spinning rust would be for backup only.

[porina]

Ever since SSDs entered the affordable mainstream I'd argue there wasn't much of a need for higher performance HDs any more, and the shift changed to optimising capacity and power consumption. Can't say I know what happened when, but shingled recording was a big tradeoff for capacity over performance. Seagate also demo'd the dual head HD thing for better access time, but to me that's really niche and not generally useful for the masses. HAMR... is that a thing yet? I'm not up to speed.

 

As a user, there are still many scenarios where a HD is still the value option unless you have deep pockets to SSD everything. Photography, video editing, game or media storage... for me right now, I have about 3TB of game installs (just in case I feel like playing something without having to wait to download it again), 2TB of historic data from when I was seriously into photography and astrophotography. I've started capturing game footage for various uses, and I can see that blowing up if I do it at any serious level. I recognise this might put me in the top % of capacity driven users but I'm surely not the only one in these and maybe other areas I haven't considered.

[kuddlesworth9419]

The problem is SSD prices aren't dropping fast enough for higher capacity drives. The people that require large capacity drives such as 10TB models are shit out of luck when it comes to using SSD's as 10TB models don't exist for consumers and if they did was cost a considerable sum of money. 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

HDDs are becoming less relevant for consumers (although a long time from being dead) but will continue to be relevant for enterprise applications since they are so much less expensive than SSDs and will be for some time to come. There are enterprise grade SSDs available in sizes larger than HDDs but they are still far too pricey for even most enterprise applications...so far.

[rawrdaysgoby]

Not really year over years if all the article showed was from 2018-19 so 1 year. Which was not surprising since there was an oversupply of Nand flash last year causing a sharp decline in prices with SSD and stuff like that. With supply finally stabilizing again for nand prices of SSD will start going back up, so will HDD again becoming an option again.

 

Though it might look grim for HDD currently, but with the new tech that Western Digital and Seagate developing for HDD and their massive storage capacity still over SSD it is still very much relevant in the industry. The laser tech from seagate and the double activator from Western digital. Each bringing up their speed much closer to SSD speeds not nvme speeds but if you are thinking of those.... I see more "potential" in WDC with the double activator then the tech from seagate. Though it should matter that much Western digital owns Sandisk so they are playing both games HDD and SSD so advancement in any of them in good for them. 

 

Even though the wattage needed for their HDD would double for their SSD like speed and much higher capacity then SSD. Imagine instead of 2 activator they add in 3 or even 4?! imagine the speed and cost savings?! And if they move onto laser like Seagate?!?!      

[BuckGup]

10 hours ago, Curious Pineapple said:

Maybe we're at a point where mechanical drives can't really get any faster. Theres a limit to how fast an actuator can move, how fast it can move and stop in the correct place, and how fine it's movements can be. More platters and being clever with where data is physically stored helps, but realistically SSD's are at the point of being cheap enough to throw in any machine (my first 1TB Caviar black cost more than a 1TB SSD does today). High capacity systems use RAID to increase throughput and have caching to speed up the most accessed data in RAM and also SSD caching.

Dual actuators can effectively double the throughout. HDDs are not going anywhere soon. We still use data tapes all the time as 10TB is like $20

[hayden1881]

 

[Curious Pineapple]

8 hours ago, BuckGup said:

Dual actuators can effectively double the throughout. HDDs are not going anywhere soon. We still use data tapes all the time as 10TB is like $20

I still use HDD's and wouldn't mind a tape drive for backups. For most users though a singls SSD is plenty.

[NeuesTestament]

Considering that you now can get 1TB SSD for a very solic price, fewer people need an HDD for Mass storage in their system. I am probably only going to put an old HDD in my new Desktop for backup and maybe media storage.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

10 hours ago, BuckGup said:

We still use data tapes all the time as 10TB is like $20

Tapes are reasonably priced but the machines that read and write to them cost an arm, a leg, and your first born.

[xtroria]

The growth of cloud services is also pushing the decline of HDD

 

we used to download movies, mp3 and jpeg from our point and shoot

 

now we use netflix, spotify and our images are up in icloud or Gphotos

 

SSD (and additional 4GB Ram stick) would literally make most laptop and desktop casual people deem “need replacement” as fast as you need it to be

[Bananasplit_00]

I'm going to keep having spinning metal in my main PC for years to come, I have lots and lots of random shit I dont need to access at light speed and my 500GB SSD is just fine for the very few things I do want fast. 

 

My NAS is also probably not going to SSDs any time soon, its too expensive of an investment for absolutely 0 realistic gain to me

[weez]

I don't really see this as all that surprising considering the average consumer doesn't really use that much storage. A 1TB external drive will get most people by for years and as has been said, cloud storage is not only growing but is being used and trusted by a lot of people. Photos are auto backed up to the cloud on iPhone and android (unless you go in and disable it). And the fact that streaming music has pretty much taken over has kind of removed the need to store music files locally. 

 

I'm planning on getting a nas set up in my home soon and that will use 2 drives. For my use case I won't be replacing or adding to the nas unless a drive fails. 

[Noctus]

And here i am planning to add 3 more 6tb HDD's to my NAS, bring on the cheap pricing !!