Nearline HDD shipments have fallen considerably from the earlier quarter after a 2021 excessive, nevertheless it is probably not an indication of the difficult financial panorama, new Trendfocus (opens in new tab) figures have claimed.

Because the pandemic hit laborious, shipments began to drop as companies reined of their spend, however with extra corporations than ever then present process digital transformation initiatives, 2021 noticed HDD shipments, together with nearline units, shoot up.

Now although, the figures are starting to deflate. Analysts counsel that this might point out a return to ‘regular’ from a synthetic excessive, quite than the consequences of belt-tightening throughout the globe.

Is 2023 the start of the top for HDDs?

Different HDD classes seem to have suffered extra, although, with mission-critical, 2.5-inch, and three.5-inch drives declining 20%, 15%, and 10% respectively through the previous quarter.

HDDs have lengthy been a staple for companies, shoppers, and just about everybody in between, providing a number of advantages corresponding to considerably bigger storage capacities in contrast with SSDs and reasonably priced pricing. With extra shifting elements, although, they’re extra vulnerable to failure.

Favored for elevated velocity and reliability, SSDs proceed to drop in value and look to be dethroning HDDs for quite a few use circumstances, together with mission-critical eventualities.

Proof that the trade is properly underway in its transition to SSDs is cloud storage big Backblaze’s adoption of over 2,900 SSDs with a mixed complete storage of round 840TB. Throughout 2022, it measured a mean annualized failure price of 0.98% in contrast with 1.37% for HDDs in the identical interval.

In keeping with the newest figures, Seagate accounts for round 44% of the HDD market with Western Digital following in second place. Toshiba trails in third place making up a contact underneath one in 5 gross sales.

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