Covid-19 and next-gen consoles hit HDD market hard

[midian182]

What just happened? Covid-19 is having a detrimental effect on several industries, including many segments of the tech sector. One of these is the hard disk drive (HDD) market, which was already in decline before disruption from the pandemic made things worse.

Analyst company Trendfocus (via Storage Newsletter) writes that the HDD market saw year-on-year shipments fall 13 percent, dropping from 77 million units in Q1 2019 to 67 million in Q1 2020. The quarter-over-quarter figure was slightly worse, falling 14 percent.

The report notes that seasonal declines took much of the blame for the figures, but production disruption in China caused by Covid-19 had an effect. One bright spot was nearline enterprise HDD shipments, which reached a record 15.7 million units thanks to US cloud and China hyperscale demand. Performance enterprise HDD shipments, meanwhile, fell 12 percent QoQ.

Trendforces writes that another reason behind the decline in HDD shipments is the upcoming next-gen consoles. The Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 both use solid state drives instead of the usual hard drives found in consoles, meaning demand from the industry has fallen drastically.

Source: Storage Newsletter

Breaking down the largest vendors’ market shares, Seagate remains top with around 42 percent. It’s followed by WDC (37 percent) then Toshiba (21 percent).

With SSDs now cheaper and available in larger storage options, hard drives aren’t as popular as they once were. With consoles and consumers abandoning the long-used technology, expect the market to rely on the enterprise sector even more in the future.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/84848-covid-19-next-gen-consoles-hit-hdd-market.html

 

[nismo91]

Almost 9 years ago I paid:
$150 for 120GB SSD
$80 for 1TB HDD

today I can spend:
$150 for 1000GB SSD + 240GB SSD (10x more capacity)
$40 for 1TB HDD (2x more capacity)

and yet today I haven't had any single SSD failure despite running tens of thousands of hours in all my SSDs. same couldn't be said for HDD. can't wait for an entry 1TB SSD to hit 60$.

 

[Cycloid Torus]

Wither 5-1/4" floppies? Over which horizon did CGA depart?

I will forever remember my first 10MB Seagate with MFM. Thank you GRC for SpinRite - which allowed us to reformat wobbly tracks. Wonderful hunks of heavy metal...now just memories.

 

[Privery]

can't wait for an entry 1TB SSD to hit 60$.

That would be amazing

 

[QuantumPhysics]

SSD prices haven't fallen as much as I'd hoped. You're still basically paying $100 per Terabyte unless you get a really good sale or buy a clearance.

You have two choices: either buy a low capacity SSD for your OS boot drive and store everything else including larger files on HDD or spend a whole lot more for larger SSD so you can keep your OS and all your main games and documents/files on that with a HDD for larger video files, music and photos.

I typically wait for sales on 2TB drives and buy those at $199 a pop.

All of my data would come to less than 10TB so I look forward to the day when I can get an 8T or 10TB SSD for a reasonable price (under $500). It will be a while.

 

[pcnthuziast]

They still have their place. 256gb m.2 for os + 1tb sata ssd for games and programs + large capacity hdd for storage = the best default imho.

 

[picka]

Haven't used HDDs on my main PC since 2012. Who on earth wants to wait around while it's fetching stuff. SSDs are the best thing to happen to pcs in a very long time.

Still got 3 WD Reds in an Unraid server for backup purposes, but would never use it on my personal computers.

That 128gb SSD from 2012 is still going as a cache drive on the server.

 

[treetops]

Haven't used HDDs on my main PC since 2012. Who on earth wants to wait around while it's fetching stuff. SSDs are the best thing to happen to pcs in a very long time.

Still got 3 WD Reds in an Unraid server for backup purposes, but would never use it on my personal computers.

That 128gb SSD from 2012 is still going as a cache drive on the server.

Video storage, oh yeah and the game collection I plan on getting to one day. I think I paid about $80 for my 4 tb HD? I have Windows slotted into a 448? gig SSD. I def do not miss using spin drives. Oh yeah and my 500ish gig spin HD from 2009 still works ^^. idk why I even have it plugged in, it's probably slowing me down a bit.

 

[Rayneofpayne]

Interesting,
Outside of Enterprise,
Most of the failures with HDDs I have encountered are usually 10k rpm HDDs data that were consumer level like WD Raptors and such, some oddities of bad batches I ignore as those are usually replaced under warranty and limited. A lot of Laptop HDDs from people banging them around. Mechanical wise at least, plenty of PCB burnouts over the years I had to replace usually across all manufacturers and all models.

Yet SSD wise I have only seen some early gen sata and second hand heavily used Enterprise level SSDs fail.