PC hard drive shipments could fall by 50 percent in 2019

onetheycallEric

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Forward-looking: Hard drive sales have been on the decline for years, and while spinning disks aren't going to dissapear overnight, involved companies are already looking elsewhere. As hard drive sales and revenue shrink, companies like Nidec who have been in the market for years must restructure to address new growth areas. Nidec, a longtime supplier of spindle motors for hard drives, predicts hard drive shipments will drop by almost 50 percent this year. As such, the motor maker will shift its focus to areas like brushless DC motors and 5G antennas.

The forecast for hard drives as it pertains to the broader consumer market continues to look grim. Nidec, a Japanese motor manufacturer, predicts hard drive shipments could slide by nearly 50 percent this year.

Nidec produces the spindle motors used in hard drives, they claim its product can be found in some 85 percent of products on the market. That would lend a certain amount of credence to its projections. The company will also be weaning itself off the hard drive market, repurposing some of its operations to address key growth areas like 5G, automotive, and home appliances.

According to the data presented by Nidec, hard drive sales have dropped by 43 percent between 2010 and 2018; or, going from 650 million units to just 375 million. Unit sales will continue to trend downwards in 2019, as they revised its shipment forecast from 356 million units to 309 million units. Nidec expects to ship even less in 2020, with shipments forecasted at only 290 million units.

As expected, internal storage for PCs and notebooks are in the toughest spot as there's a long awaited migration to solid state storage. Nicec notes that PC hard drives have been gradually declining since 2013, but 2019 will see a sharp drop -- going from 124 million units sold in 2018 to just 64 million units in 2019, or roughly a 48 percent decline.

However, external storage and nearline storage are expected to remain stable, and even grow a bit. Spinning disks still offer the cheapest, densest storage available, and while they're not relevant for primary storage anymore, they still offer significant value in areas like NAS, surveillance, or secondary storage.

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Might be more the effect of the cloud (streaming, VOD) then SSDs, which established their impact on the market before this year.

It is honestly surprising how many of the younger generation (12 - 21) is willing to rely on the cloud. Lower quality, complete loss of control of what is available, zero ownership, and the requirement to agree to the TOS and continue to pay in order to access those services. Not to mention the disadvantages of relying on the internet for all your needs.
 
Might be more the effect of the cloud (streaming, VOD) then SSDs, which established their impact on the market before this year.

It is honestly surprising how many of the younger generation (12 - 21) is willing to rely on the cloud. Lower quality, complete loss of control of what is available, zero ownership, and the requirement to agree to the TOS and continue to pay in order to access those services. Not to mention the disadvantages of relying on the internet for all your needs.

You saved me a bit of typing :)

Does iTunes still let you download your purchased content? Or has Apple joined the dark side too?
 
Might be more the effect of the cloud (streaming, VOD) then SSDs, which established their impact on the market before this year.

It is honestly surprising how many of the younger generation (12 - 21) is willing to rely on the cloud. Lower quality, complete loss of control of what is available, zero ownership, and the requirement to agree to the TOS and continue to pay in order to access those services. Not to mention the disadvantages of relying on the internet for all your needs.
Could put some of the blame on older people not properly teaching the younger generation. No matter how people see it, there's blame that can go all around.
Don't forget some of the younger people (kids) have mommy and daddy paying for things so they either don't care or don't worry about certain things. They just have something/use what they are told to use/need. They simply just don't know any better as why should they, they aren't the ones paying for anything. Can you blame them? Would you really care if you are that age and all these things are your finger tips, I doubt it.
 
It is honestly surprising how many of the younger generation (12 - 21) is willing to rely on the cloud. Lower quality, complete loss of control of what is available, zero ownership, and the requirement to agree to the TOS and continue to pay in order to access those services. Not to mention the disadvantages of relying on the internet for all your needs.

When I have conversations with friends and family about cold storage or physical movies, I look like a madman. I have no issues with digital games since you don't lose quality in the product, but with streamed movies you lose so much, it is like night and day; color banding and color compression annoy me a lot, specially when you can't distinguish a damn thing -HBO Go, I'm looking at you.
 
You saved me a bit of typing :)

Does iTunes still let you download your purchased content? Or has Apple joined the dark side too?

They do but you have to jump through some hoops. I don't personally own any Apple products, I just help people who do.

Could put some of the blame on older people not properly teaching the younger generation. No matter how people see it, there's blame that can go all around.
Don't forget some of the younger people (kids) have mommy and daddy paying for things so they either don't care or don't worry about certain things. They just have something/use what they are told to use/need. They simply just don't know any better as why should they, they aren't the ones paying for anything. Can you blame them? Would you really care if you are that age and all these things are your finger tips, I doubt it.

I think what you are describing is the current American condition many families find themselves in. You have both parents working with hardly any free time for family. You'd be lucky to find a homecooked meal anymore for many people. They have extra money but not extra time, so it makes sense they'd give their children the only resource they have free. It's unfortunately that I'm seeing that being passed down to the next generation as well. Work work work, everyone is working but no one is really getting ahead. Well, at least in the middle and lower classes.

I might be an exception but I certainly like to own my digital media and watch it on my time, in the highest quality possible without restrictions.
 
With the rise of cheap NVMe and UFS storage. There is little to no need for HDD and ODD in average laptop or desktop.
I see HDD's as more like archival media to further reduce the cost we would need to consolidate manufacturing to higer capacity drives, fewer models, as well as introducing Remanufacturing of failed drives at large scale (so we could use some parts all over again)
In that sense HDD's would be here to stay for long
 
4k smart phone cameras will keep the need for hdd even more relevant, that is if people realize a cheap hdd can store all those videos\photos. Also I'd assume everything stored on a cloud is being stored on a hdd? It doesn't matter if it's here or there..... A standalone storage device would sell well. Like a roku that automatically stores your pics\photos over blue tooth when you get home. 4k vids take around 120 gig an hour. 10 tb of google one cloud storage costs 100$ a month.

Then again a lot people just post video to FB
 
Local prices of HDDs in local stores near my town in the Philippines are still higher than before the Thailand floods many years ago which drove HDD prices higher.

many years ago, I could buy 1TB HDD at around 2300php (~52php : 1$ u.s.). current price is around 2600php-2900php depending on brand and store.

the only good thing is local stores are now selling alternative SSDs at more affordable price points.
 
No doubt that those that have never known more than the cloud have come to depend upon it, but for those that have experienced major internet down time when were in the middle of putting together reports that take large quantities of data and need it immediately, that can be another story. I'm afraid I've seen enough government abuse of privacy that I'm not going to trust some of these files to the cloud. Nothing illegal but I prefer my privacy and don't want to relive another Orwell's 1984 ......
 
Might be more the effect of the cloud (streaming, VOD) then SSDs, which established their impact on the market before this year.

It is honestly surprising how many of the younger generation (12 - 21) is willing to rely on the cloud. Lower quality, complete loss of control of what is available, zero ownership, and the requirement to agree to the TOS and continue to pay in order to access those services. Not to mention the disadvantages of relying on the internet for all your needs.

Clouds are about the data we share, not streaming I suppose. I personally don't like it and tend to agree with you here.

As of streaming, we don't need to store what we can get via the internet at any time. Why not to rely on your connection when it's working fast and is almost absolutely stable all the time? I sold all my big HDDs and now use much smaller one, I just don't need anything else.

Even though I'm much older than teenagers and my university years are far away either, I personally don't need to own things. It's anyway temporary. I sell my old things when I don't use them for more than a year or two. I still have a collection of CDs, but I'm not sure that it will hurt me much shall I clean out the shelves from them.

I like to have spare time instead of hard work, which I have had enough during prev 1x years. I enjoy greener grass today and I'm not feeling it was greener in my youth. Thanks to home-cooked meal I feel better than previously. Probably one can say that I'm taking best from both worlds today, from the generation that like to own and be stable, and from the one that appreciates freedome and being responsible where it matters the most.
 
Another factor is HD size. I recently upgraded and consolidated all my 4tb HD to 12tb. That is a 3:1 shipment loss for the industry so to speak. I upgraded 15 4tb plus the backups another 15 4tb hds to a total of 10 12tb hard drives. So while the cost may not have been a loss shipment wise was way down from 30 hard drives to 10.
 
Another factor is HD size. I recently upgraded and consolidated all my 4tb HD to 12tb. That is a 3:1 shipment loss for the industry so to speak. I upgraded 15 4tb plus the backups another 15 4tb hds to a total of 10 12tb hard drives. So while the cost may not have been a loss shipment wise was way down from 30 hard drives to 10.

This is true. I bought quad drive cases many years ago when 1.5TB was the top size but now all my stuff fits on 2x10TB drives with spare space to grow. Plus a 2x8TB and 3x5TB pair of backups of course. I think the last quad setup I used was 4x4GB.
 
Clouds are about the data we share, not streaming I suppose. I personally don't like it and tend to agree with you here.

As of streaming, we don't need to store what we can get via the internet at any time. Why not to rely on your connection when it's working fast and is almost absolutely stable all the time? I sold all my big HDDs and now use much smaller one, I just don't need anything else.

Even though I'm much older than teenagers and my university years are far away either, I personally don't need to own things. It's anyway temporary. I sell my old things when I don't use them for more than a year or two. I still have a collection of CDs, but I'm not sure that it will hurt me much shall I clean out the shelves from them.

I like to have spare time instead of hard work, which I have had enough during prev 1x years. I enjoy greener grass today and I'm not feeling it was greener in my youth. Thanks to home-cooked meal I feel better than previously. Probably one can say that I'm taking best from both worlds today, from the generation that like to own and be stable, and from the one that appreciates freedome and being responsible where it matters the most.

"Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user. The term is generally used to describe data centers available to many users over the Internet. Large clouds, predominant today, often have functions distributed over multiple locations from central servers. If the connection to the user is relatively close, it may be designated an edge server."

It can apply to any online service or product. In the case of twitch, cloud computing is used to provide the processing power needed to stream videos all over the world. Cloud computing is specifically the dynamic allocation of computing resources to any online service. Compare that to traditional methods, like for example a company buying it's own servers or renting servers in fixed locations. Not only is this more costly upfront, it doesn't allow a company to dynamically scale computing resources to meet dynamic demand. It a common misconception that people have to thing that cloud computing only provides services to end-consumers like data storage. In fact many major online services today are provided by servers in the cloud.
 
"Cloud computing is

Well, ok. When you said "the cloud" you did mean "cloud computing", I missed it in my previous comment. That's what you could have just said instead of sharing a wiki paragraph.

From the consumer's point of view there's a "cloud service" narrowed to "cloud storage", for docs, photos, videos etc. That's what a consumer uploads from his own storage to "the cloud" and downloads back when (if) needed.

Looks like my comment as a whole unintentionally led to removal of disambiguation of the term "cloud" here. Because in the context of the article it has more narrow meaning of "cloud storage", especially when we look on the headline.
 
Well, ok. When you said "the cloud" you did mean "cloud computing", I missed it in my previous comment. That's what you could have just said instead of sharing a wiki paragraph.

From the consumer's point of view there's a "cloud service" narrowed to "cloud storage", for docs, photos, videos etc. That's what a consumer uploads from his own storage to "the cloud" and downloads back when (if) needed.

Looks like my comment as a whole unintentionally led to removal of disambiguation of the term "cloud" here. Because in the context of the article it has more narrow meaning of "cloud storage", especially when we look on the headline.

Yep, did mean the latter. The Cloud is just shorthand for cloud computing but I guess it means something different to professionals and consumers.
 
Where the report indicated came from. I have been a tech for over 20 yrs, SATA hard drives have faster access rate, but they die faster than the old IDE drives. I have IDE drives that are 18 yrs old, and still working. Yet my new HP Envy notebook is only 2 yrs old, the hdd is already dead. It's as if techs keeps away from talking about the issues when it comes to SATA hdd. And recently a dell notebook with a 512GB sad drive, also gone bad already. Shipments to manufactures, may have a slight drop, but consumers replacement of hdd is on the rise.
 
SSD are far more efficient and quality has improved considerably as time has gone on.
They are silent, faster and more energy efficient - along with being smaller and more compact. SSD's are far superior in laptops for mass savings and portability.

Then factor in cloud services. Huge HDD aren't needed in most cases where Network Access Servers are present or there's video on demand.

HDD need to die. Aside from cheap mass storage I can name no benefits.
 
SSD are far more efficient and quality has improved considerably as time has gone on.
They are silent, faster and more energy efficient - along with being smaller and more compact. SSD's are far superior in laptops for mass savings and portability.

Then factor in cloud services. Huge HDD aren't needed in most cases where Network Access Servers are present or there's video on demand.

HDD need to die. Aside from cheap mass storage I can name no benefits.

Cheap mass storage is a really big benefit though. They are still an order of magnitudes cheaper in that regard.
 
SSD are far more efficient and quality has improved considerably as time has gone on.
They are silent, faster and more energy efficient - along with being smaller and more compact. SSD's are far superior in laptops for mass savings and portability.

Then factor in cloud services. Huge HDD aren't needed in most cases where Network Access Servers are present or there's video on demand.

HDD need to die. Aside from cheap mass storage I can name no benefits.

Where are you getting your misinformation from?

In laptops, SSD's are not smaller, more compact or more energy efficient than hard drives

I have several 2.5" Western Digital Laptop drives that are all 0.55 Amp @ 5V and will run fine from the motherboards USB power alone

A Samsung 850-Pro SSD is 1.5 Amp @ 5V
A Crucial MX500 SSD is 1.7 Amp @ 5V

Both SSD's can cause problems when running them from USB Power and must be connected directly to the power supply

Both SSD's are the same size as the laptop drives
 
Where are you getting your misinformation from?

In laptops, SSD's are not smaller, more compact or more energy efficient than hard drives

I have several 2.5" Western Digital Laptop drives that are all 0.55 Amp @ 5V and will run fine from the motherboards USB power alone

A Samsung 850-Pro SSD is 1.5 Amp @ 5V
A Crucial MX500 SSD is 1.7 Amp @ 5V

Both SSD's can cause problems when running them from USB Power and must be connected directly to the power supply

Both SSD's are the same size as the laptop drives


Your comment is 100% wrong.

SSD are smaller, lighter and more efficient in the lack of moving parts.

No one said anything about USB power.
 
Where are you getting your misinformation from?

In laptops, SSD's are not smaller, more compact or more energy efficient than hard drives

I have several 2.5" Western Digital Laptop drives that are all 0.55 Amp @ 5V and will run fine from the motherboards USB power alone

A Samsung 850-Pro SSD is 1.5 Amp @ 5V
A Crucial MX500 SSD is 1.7 Amp @ 5V

Both SSD's can cause problems when running them from USB Power and must be connected directly to the power supply

Both SSD's are the same size as the laptop drives


Your comment is 100% wrong.

SSD are smaller, lighter and more efficient in the lack of moving parts.

No one said anything about USB power.

YOU are 100% wrong
Your second line stated, and I quote....."more energy efficient"

Whether its USB power, battery power or desktop power supply... power is power!
My Laptop hard drives are more energy efficient than any 2.5" SSD I have

and yes, my SSD's are the same size as my laptop drives!

You are 100% Wrong Again!
 
YOU are 100% wrong
Your second line stated, and I quote....."more energy efficient"

Whether its USB power, battery power or desktop power supply... power is power!
My Laptop hard drives are more energy efficient than any 2.5" SSD I have

and yes, my SSD's are the same size as my laptop drives!

You are 100% Wrong Again!


#1 You are 100% wrong again.

#2 I'm done arguing. Lose my number.
 
YOU are 100% wrong
Your second line stated, and I quote....."more energy efficient"

Whether its USB power, battery power or desktop power supply... power is power!
My Laptop hard drives are more energy efficient than any 2.5" SSD I have

and yes, my SSD's are the same size as my laptop drives!

You are 100% Wrong Again!


#1 You are 100% wrong again.

#2 I'm done arguing. Lose my number.

That's it....
RageQuit while your still behind

Smart move!
 
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