Nearline HDD shipments have fallen considerably from the earlier quarter after a 2021 excessive, but it surely is probably not an indication of the difficult financial panorama, new Trendfocus (opens in new tab) figures have claimed.
Because the pandemic hit arduous, shipments began to drop as companies reined of their spend, however with extra firms 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, reasonably 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 throughout the previous quarter.
HDDs have lengthy been a staple for companies, customers, and nearly everybody in between, providing a number of advantages similar to considerably bigger storage capacities in contrast with SSDs and inexpensive pricing. With extra transferring elements, although, they’re extra vulnerable to failure.
Favored for elevated pace and reliability, SSDs proceed to drop in value and look to be dethroning HDDs for a lot of use circumstances, together with mission-critical situations.
Proof that the business is effectively underway in its transition to SSDs is cloud storage large Backblaze’s adoption of over 2,900 SSDs with a mixed complete storage of round 840TB. Throughout 2022, it measured a median annualized failure price of 0.98% in contrast with 1.37% for HDDs in the identical interval.
In accordance with the most recent 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 below one in 5 gross sales.