Surprisingly, last year, corporate HDDs were more popular than SSDs and their sales are growing

The last plus or minus five years in wide circles there is an opinion that SSDs and other solid-state drives will systematically push out from the market HDD and other data storage technologies, which are based on mechanisms with moving parts. In part, this opinion is true, because SSD SATA 3 and SSD m.2 already dominate as system disks for home PCs and workstations: no one in their right mind will collect a high-performance gaming or working configuration based on HDD as a system disk.



The same situation was observed in 2018 in terms of corporate decisions. Sales of SSDs and the total share of hosting offers, the penetration of solid-state drives into the corporate segment and the overall dominance of this technology only intensified. The manufacturers were particularly worried by the 2.5 "HDD segment, which is in greater danger than the full-format 3.5" in terms of absorption of the SSD sector. Sales of HDDs were steadily falling, both in terms of products shipped in absolute terms and in terms of memory volumes of hard drives sold.

Last year, everything changed.

Let's look at the numbers from the TrendForce market analytics report.

First: the share of shipped SSDs by the number of products decreased from 12% in 2018 to 10.4% in 2019. At the same time, the total memory capacity of implemented solid-state drives grew by 60%, which in absolute numbers is ~ 16 690 Petabytes of memory.

Second: the share of nearline-HDD (SAAS HDD) increased to 89%, and their total memory in absolute terms increased by 83% compared to last year and amounted to ~ 138,200 Petabytes.

The dynamics are absolutely clear and transparent. Even with a decrease in the number of sales, which, incidentally, was predicted by manufacturers back in mid-2019, their capacity increases - that is, the amount of memory sold. This trend was already evident in the region of 2018, when flash memory became rapidly cheaper and SSD drives with a capacity of more than 256 GB appeared on the consumer market, for the purchase of which there was no need to sell a kidney. The market was accelerated by the emergence of new interfaces and form factors for SSD chips - NVMe and m.2, respectively, which, obviously, facilitated manufacturers some aspects of the creation and assembly of drives.


From left to right: two SSD drives with SATA and mSATA interface, SATA m.2 drive and NVMe m.2 drive. It is important to remember that m.2 is a form factor when both SATA and NVMe are data transfer interfaces

The decline in sales of SSDs is actually a rather strange trend that, according to many, will not be fixed in the long run. Even if we discard statistics and turn to our own experience as a large data center, we can say with confidence: the popularity of SSD-based solutions is only growing. It’s commonplace to give an example of search queries for which customers come to us. If we exclude from the list the specific ones related to the rental of racks, then the top 3 confidently includes “rental of a virtual SPb server” , “vps spb” and “dedicated SPb server” .

That is, practice shows that now it is VPS solutions that are most in demand among consumers now, which for several years any hoster who respects himself and his clients has been supplying based on SSD. But sales of exactly HDDs are growing. And here hosters or ordinary consumers no longer affect anything: the Enterprise segment pushes up the HDD.

What affected the growth of HDD sales

If you briefly analyze the news agenda over the past year in the field of equipment, you can see that Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba were completely not going to give up and die under the pressure of flash memory manufacturers. More can be said: thanks to the SSDs that finally pushed the giants, the latter stopped enjoying life, riveting 250 and 500 GB disks, and began to seriously develop new solutions. Moreover, these solutions were far from being only consumer ones: hard drive manufacturers are confidently following the path of work to the needs of large corporations.

At the end of last year, we already wrote about the new Toshiba HDD line up to 6 TB , but this is far from the news of the segment. Over the past 12 months, Seagate has introduceddisks of the IronWolf and IronWolf Pro line for small and medium-sized businesses up to 16 TB, swung at disks up to 20 TB in 2020. At the same time, both Seagate and Toshiba are working on the use of HAMR technology - a method of recording through heating of HDD magnetic disks with a laser. Toshiba also plans to increase the number of “pancakes” of HDD from 9 standard disks for corporate solutions, to 10 in one 3.5 ”form factor housing.

Western Digital also does not sleep. In 2019, they confirmed their willingness to invest in developing HAMR technology and MAMR (recording using microwaves rather than a laser) .WD



also became the largest supplier of corporate drives for 14 TB and back in December 2019 began familiarization deliveries of corporate HDDs with volumes of 18 and 20 TB.

All this, together with an increase in the volume of stored data, has a beneficial effect on the market for larger and more stable HDDs against the background of flash memory. In fact, we got a paradoxical situation of the coexistence of two generations of technologies on one time period in the distant future: at least five to seven years will pass when SSDs will catch up to their older brothers from among HDDs at a cost per gigabyte, and the latter will leave by this moment farther. At the same time, demand will only grow: at a time when ten lines of code are wrapped in Electron and get an application or extension that consumes more resources than the entire workstation had ten to fifteen years ago, exchange for such a “trifle” as optimization data storage and saving disk space, no one is going to.

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