Worldwide HDD Shipment Has Been Declining Since 2010

Steady Downward Trend for HDDs

The hard disk drives is an essential part of any PC build. However, it appears that worldwide shipment has been on a steady decline since 2010. Prior to that however, it was in an upward trend, selling exponentially ever since 1976*. In fact, the total HDD shipment from then until now is over 9 billion HDD units.

The only time the sales declined before that was in 2001, which is attributed mostly to the worldwide economy. After 2010, the only upward tick was in 2014.

This data revelation is collected from various industry sources including Trendfocus, Disk/Trend and IDC.

*The first HDD is actually much older than that and debuted in 1956. This is the IBM 305 Ramac, with a 4.4MB capacity across 50 24-inches disks and costs $50,000.

Why are HDD Sales Going Down?

There are of course several factors contributing to the HDD shipment decline. One of which is the rise of Solid-State drive storage (SSD), while the other can be attributed to increasing HDD capacity.

Seagate for example revealed a roadmap for their HAMR technology drives with a goal of up to 40+TB by 2023. This technology also expects to ramp up capacity close to 100TB+ in just two years after that. This is important since the last few remaining markets for HDDs that aren’t being eaten by SSDs are in the high-capacity sector.

For now, SSD capacity growth is still lagging behind traditional platter capacity in terms of price-per-GB. HDDs that are under 1TB and under however, cannot compete with SSDs for value. Mostly due to the fact that SSDs are significantly faster.

According to Storage Newsletter, 7200 RPM will continue to be the most dominant drive speed for HDD. Other rotational speed options including 5,400 RPM, and 10,000 RPM enterprise drives will vanish. The latter, especially burdened by their higher price.