The mixed impact of a drop-off in PC demand and the tempo of SSD adoption led to a big fall in onerous drive shipments final quarter, a brand new report suggests.

Information from analyst agency Trendfocus exhibits HDD shipments plummeted 15.4% in Q2 on a quarter-to-quarter foundation, with unit gross sales amongst distributors like Toshiba dropping by as a lot as 17.3%.

Though the image seems to be rather less bleak relating to performance-focused enterprise drives and nearline items (which bridge the hole between on-line and offline storage), demand for many HDD segments fell by doubt-digit percentages throughout the interval.

The demise of the HDD?

Commentators have lengthy exaggerated the immediacy of the risk to the onerous drive market posed by SSDs. Though HDDs are dramatically slower, the associated fee per capability stays decrease, which suggests organizations that have to retailer large volumes of knowledge nonetheless stand to profit. HDDs are nonetheless comparatively frequent in non-premium client gadgets too.

Nevertheless, as strong state drives develop into quicker, cheaper and extra capacious, the variety of use circumstances for the HDD is undoubtedly shrinking.

Earlier this 12 months, for instance, Micron turned the primary firm to ship 176-layer QLC NAND flash at quantity, a improvement that has the potential to deliver SSDs to even the most cost effective laptops.

Microsoft can be getting ready to drive PC producers to desert HDD boot drives, presumably in an effort to extend the extent and consistency of efficiency throughout Home windows 11 {hardware}. Though the ban applies as well drives solely, dual-drive techniques are a rarity, which suggests HDDs will successfully be pushed to the fringes of the PC market.

In an enterprise context, in the meantime, it’s anticipated that the utmost SSD capability will leap considerably (to maybe 400TB) off the again of recent applied sciences, closing the hole on onerous drives from a value per capability perspective.

HDDs are additionally being squeezed from the other way; will increase within the capability of magnetic tape (the present technology, LTO-9, has a local capability of 18TB) means the case for utilizing onerous drives for archival functions is more and more weak.

Though analysts keep companies are greatest served by sustaining a balanced storage stack comprised of tape, HDDs and SSDs, which ought to cowl off each use case in essentially the most economical method, the onerous drive will solely discover itself in an more and more perilous place.

• Again-up your information with one of the best exterior drives and greatest transportable SSDs

By way of Storage E-newsletter (opens in new tab)