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Time for hard drives to hit the road?

January 16, 2023.

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Hard drive sales have crashed, as evidenced by a 40% drop in 2022. The three industry leaders saw similar drops last year, with a 43.7% shipment decrease for biggest producer Seagate, 40% for Western Digital Technologies and 39.3% for Toshiba. There are several reasons for these soft results. Some are due to market trends, such as inventory correction, a cooling economy, companies’ weaker demand for cloud storage, etc. But another disruptor poses a lasting threat to the HD industry: increasing competition from SSDs, which are growing more affordable. For example, hard drives and half-terabyte SSDs are now reaching price parity. And if you buy a new laptop, there's a 9 in 10 chance it will have an internal SSD. The consumer market is hanging on thanks to external HDs, usually purchased for back-ups. But for how much longer, if the price of high-capacity SSDs keeps dropping?

Tom’s Hardware, Mark Tyson, “HDD Shipments Almost Halved in 2022.”

2023-01-16