hard drives Hard Drive Shipments and Sales Declined, Nearly Cut in Half in 2022

[BiG StroOnZ]

Summary

A recent report from Trendfocus shows SSD sales continue to rise dramatically, while HDD manufacturers are noticing record-breaking declines in overall shipments. Analysts estimate that shipments declined by more than 40 percent compared to 2021. The drop at Seagate and WDC has been nearly half that of the industry average.

 

 

Quotes

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For the first time in 2020, SSDs outsold HDDs. Statista noted in September that HDD shipment levels went nearly unchanged in 2021, falling by only 0.5%. Unfortunately for manufacturers, this stagnation didn't last long.

 

The latest report from Trendfocus analysts covers the quarterly and yearly changes for the three largest HDD manufacturers --Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital Corp. (WDC). The results provided in the analysis don't bode well for those producers.

 

Data shows that the largest company in the HDD industry is also the worst performing. Last year, HDD shipments plummeted by as much as 43.7% for Seagate and by almost as much for WDC, 43.0%. By 2022, however, Toshiba was not immune to the market downturn, with HDD shipments decreasing by as much as 39.3 percent year over year (YoY). In addition, industry shipments dropped as much as 42.5% annually to around 35-36 million products. According to Trendfocus, the decline in demand from enterprise cloud storage providers is the largest problem HDD storage manufacturers face right now. 

 

Oddly enough, despite the sharp decline in shipments, 2.5" HDDs still "rebounded" by nearly 15 percent quarter-for-quarter. However, these were the only drives that saw an increase in sales. Consumer drives declined by mid-single-digit percentages, which, while not promising, is still a far cry from what occurred in the enterprise industry.

 

My thoughts

I think this trend will continue on in the future as SSDs become more affordable. As it stands, 500GB SSDs have reached price parity with 500GB HDDs. I don't see that it's too far off to believe that this spreads with higher GB SDDs in the future. Even M.2 NVMe solutions have become way more affordable, and they are supremely faster than SATA SSDs. You can get a 2TB Kingston PCIe 4.0 NVMe for around $100 today. While a well performing HDD like the Seagate BarraCuda 2TB Compute with 256MB Cache costs $50. For $50 more, going with the NVMe SSD, you get much, much faster speeds. Which makes more sense. I do see for NAS setups and for certain applications HDDs still have their value. However, I think if people can, in the future, go with an all SSD setup. They probably will. 

 

Sources

https://www.techspot.com/news/97294-shipments-hdds-nearly-halved-2022.html

https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/hdd-sales-declinedcut-in-half-in-2022.html

[Heliian]

Laptops don't really come with HDDs anymore, heck, mine only has space for 2 m.2 drives.  

Cloud services are more popular now. 

The price gap is narrowing as you said. 

 

Still HDDs have their place though as you can store huge amounts of data reliably.  My redundant backups are all hdd and the value is incredible.

[Donut417]

1 hour ago, BiG StroOnZ said:

I do see for NAS setups and for certain applications HDDs still have their value. However, I think if people can, in the future, go with an all SSD setup. They probably will. 

Hard drives are really only useful if you need mass storage. Because you can get a larger drive for cheaper. Its a little over $100 for a 8TB hard drive, and the same as an SSD is in the $500+ range. 

 

The SSD's Ive looked at that were "affordable" seem to be in the 2TB or lower range. Anything above that is a bit more money then most are probably willing to pay. 

[wseaton]

Businesses are going to the cloud and consumers are decreasingly being data horders as they just stream what they need. 8 - 16 TB spinners are the sweet spot, but fewer and fewer people are buying big spinners. HD market is being crunched by both ends.

[Donut417]

2 minutes ago, wseaton said:

Businesses are going to the cloud and consumers are decreasingly being data horders as they just stream what they need. 8 - 16 TB spinners are the sweet spot,

But with all the data breaches and such. Id be more wary of the cloud. As streaming services keep raising their rates to match the cable company, I have a feeling people might go back to hording data as well as raising the jolly roger. 

[vertigo220]

SSDs are definitely coming down a lot in price lately, but they're still a lot more per TB than HDDs. The only reason there would be a price parity between a 500GB HDD and SSD is because HDDs, probably just due to the materials, only get so cheap. This results in not much price difference between a 500GB HDD and a 4TB one, and going with anything less than 1-2TB for a HDD just doesn't make much sense, because it's so much per GB and an SSD would be better at that price. But a cheap 2TB SSD is still going to cost around $125 give or take, and a cheap 4TB ~$275, whereas you can get a roughly 8TB and 16TB HDD for those prices. So SSD storage is still ~4x as much at decent sizes.

 

I do agree that for people who only need a few TB or less of storage, SSD makes more sense, as even though it's more expensive it's significantly faster and more reliable, and since that's all many/most people need, that's definitely part of the reason for lower HDD sales. But part of the reason is also HDD prices, which have not come down much at all for the past few years. I would have bought more drives much sooner than I did fairly recently but the prices were just ridiculous and I waited as long as I could, hoping they would come down. I still need more, but am again waiting as long as I can. In November 2017, I paid $18.75/TB and $26.25 for drives. When I bought some half a year ago, I paid $17.81/TB, and the prices haven't budged since then, though you can get some at ~$14-15/TB. Maybe if they actually lowered the prices to make them a better value they'd sell more. In five years, they've come down so that on average they cost ~70-75% as much, whereas SSDs cost ~25% what they did then. If that trend continues, we're looking at price parity at larger capacities in about five years, and probably sooner since SSD price drops over time tend to be more logarithmic.

 

Considering all the major HDD manufacturers (really there's only two or three, which is probably another reason for the lack of price drops) also make SSDs, and SSDs are probably cheaper to make and are more reliable, meaning less warranty service, I'm guessing they actually want HDDs to go away.

[Vishera]

5 hours ago, BiG StroOnZ said:

I think this trend will continue on in the future as SSDs become more affordable. As it stands, 500GB SSDs have reached price parity with 500GB HDDs. I don't see that it's too far off to believe that this spreads with higher GB SDDs in the future. Even M.2 NVMe solutions have become way more affordable, and they are supremely faster than SATA SSDs. You can get a 2TB Kingston PCIe 4.0 NVMe for around $100 today. While a well performing HDD like the Seagate BarraCuda 2TB Compute with 256MB Cache costs $50. For $50 more, going with the NVMe SSD, you get much, much faster speeds. Which makes more sense. I do see for NAS setups and for certain applications HDDs still have their value. However, I think if people can, in the future, go with an all SSD setup. They probably will. 

Speaking about consumer drives that had single digit drop in revenue but completely ignoring the enterprise drives that  are the bulk of the revenue loss doesn't make sense to me.

5 hours ago, BiG StroOnZ said:

According to Trendfocus, the decline in demand from enterprise cloud storage providers is the largest problem HDD storage manufacturers face right now. 

 

Oddly enough, despite the sharp decline in shipments, 2.5" HDDs still "rebounded" by nearly 15 percent quarter-for-quarter. However, these were the only drives that saw an increase in sales. Consumer drives declined by mid-single-digit percentages, which, while not promising, is still a far cry from what occurred in the enterprise industry.

Enterprises are probably moving to SAS SSD drives.

 

I don't see that happening with consumers any time soon since SAS SSDs very expensive and consumer motherboards don't support SAS at the moment.

In the consumer space hard drives are more viable, they are a cost effective solution to mass storage that consumer SSDs can't match.

At the price of a 500GB SSD you can buy a 2TB HDD,

And taking into consideration that a lot of modern video games reach 100GB - a SSD for a boot drive + a HDD for mass storage is a must if you don't want to install and uninstall games all day just because you don't have enough capacity on your 500GB SSD or you could go for the expensive route and buy a 2TB+ of SSD storage.

[Doobeedoo]

No surprise. Most don't even have one. Aside from those requireing a ton of TBs for cheap like NAS zero reason to have.

[ewitte]

11 hours ago, Donut417 said:

Hard drives are really only useful if you need mass storage. Because you can get a larger drive for cheaper. Its a little over $100 for a 8TB hard drive, and the same as an SSD is in the $500+ range. 

 

The SSD's Ive looked at that were "affordable" seem to be in the 2TB or lower range. Anything above that is a bit more money then most are probably willing to pay. 

I wouldn't want to use a $100 HDD.  It will be slow and not very reliable.  I'm partial to higher RPM NAS drives with better URE ratings though which is closer to about $180 for 8TB.

[GhostRoadieBL]

As someone who has been looking to update my nas for about 3 years waiting for the right price v capacity, HDD prices haven't changed as much as when the first few 8tb drives first showed up. It's been around 5years of 8tb drives sitting between $150-200. Some of the high capacity 16+tb models have come down from $450 but the price per tb hasn't really changed in years.

 

This is likely due to the slim margins on hard drives and we've hit the manufacturing limits of cheapest components for the devices even at the economy of scale hdd manufacturers benefit from.

 

I'm hopeful as stock ages prices will fall again but NAND density is rising faster than HDD prices are falling so we should see a crossover point for the home nas user transitioning to full ssd arrays costing less than HDDs.

[BiG StroOnZ]

16 hours ago, Vishera said:

Speaking about consumer drives that had single digit drop in revenue but completely ignoring the enterprise drives that  are the bulk of the revenue loss doesn't make sense to me.

 

Enterprises are probably moving to SAS SSD drives.

 

I don't see that happening with consumers any time soon since SAS SSDs very expensive and consumer motherboards don't support SAS at the moment.

In the consumer space hard drives are more viable, they are a cost effective solution to mass storage that consumer SSDs can't match.

At the price of a 500GB SSD you can buy a 2TB HDD,

 

And taking into consideration that a lot of modern video games reach 100GB - a SSD for a boot drive + a HDD for mass storage is a must if you don't want to install and uninstall games all day just because you don't have enough capacity on your 500GB SSD or you could go for the expensive route and buy a 2TB+ of SSD storage.

 

Well there will be some crossover between Enterprise and Consumer. Enterprise tends to adopt trends first. I was just trying to bring this topic more in line to what the average consumer will see. However, you are correct, the bulk of the revenue loss was with Enterprise.

 

It seems many Enterprises are making the move to NVMe SSDs. I think those are U.2, but it seems U.2 might still be considered being similar to SAS (U.2 is SFF-8639 standard while SAS is SFF-8482 standard). I think similarly you can see that consumers are also making the switch to standard M.2 NVMe SSDs.

 

I agree though that SAS SSDs are probably not going to invade the consumer space.

 

For mass storage, no doubt, HDDs are more cost effective, however what will the market look like 5-10 years from now? What will a 4TB/8TB/16TB SSD cost by then?

 

Right, at the price of a 500GB SSD you can buy a 2TB HDD, but for about $50 more you can buy a 2TB SSD.

 

I think the SSD + HDD combo really isn't as necessary as it was 2-11 years ago. Now you can get a 1TB SSD for as low as $40 and a 2TB SSD for as low as $80. Even if a game is 100GB you can install plenty of those on a 1-2TB SSD. With 1-2TB of storage you really don't have to worry about uninstalling games since you really don't lack capacity. People tend to only install their main games anyway. I don't really consider 2TB of SSD storage the expensive route anymore. Even if you get a 500GB SSD + 2TB HDD it's going to cost you around $23 for the SSD + around $43 for the 2TB HDD. That brings you to $66. Only $34 more gets you a 2TB SSD. While the prior config has 500GB more of space, I would prioritize fast storage over mass storage; since most people stream these days and tend to not download as much. 

[leadeater]

16 hours ago, Vishera said:

Enterprises are probably moving to SAS SSD drives.

Nope, SATA or NVMe. SAS is pre-NVMe solution.

[bcredeur97]

3 hours ago, leadeater said:

Nope, SATA or NVMe. SAS is pre-NVMe solution.

NVMe servers are so friggen expensive still. 

I have noticed that once you get to 3.84TB ssd's -- NVMe starts getting cheaper than SATA. In the used market anyway.. which is all I personally care about LOL

 

but it is weird that you get caught in a catch 22 -- save on drives and get better drives -- but have to pay more (a lot more) for the hardware to use them

 

[Mark Kaine]

So what my Nostradamus like senses are telling me:

Hard-drives will become really cheap over the next year or so, manufacturers will almost stop producing them, and people will continue to buy them because they're cheap and reliable  --> prices will rise to new astronomical heights... ~

 

 

[mr moose]

I hoard all my photos and home videos,  Those I do not have in hard copy so I am reliant on a few TB hdd's for storage and backup.   I am waiting for someone to develop long term archive like storage that doesn't half my house to setup.