Global HDD sales drop another 12% to 77 million devices for Q1 2019
You probably have noticed that SSDs came, saw and conquered the storage markets the past few years. And that certainly has an effect on HDD sales. In the years to come I predict there will be a tipping point where productions ramps down and HDDs will become more expensive than SSDs.
The first signs of the dropping HDD market is here if we look at the first quarterly figures of 2019from a Trendfocus article it shows that the sales numbers of 3.5 and 2.5-inch consumer HDDs have dropped significantly. Interestingly enough sales of business HDDs, on the other hand, have risen.
In the first quarter of 2019, 24.5 million disks were shipped out which is roughly four million less than the last quarter of 2018. The number of 2.5-inch devices (often used in laptops) has dropped by 6 million units to 37 million.
Vendor | HDDs in million |
Q/Q growth | Y/Y growth | Market share |
Seagate | 31.40 – 31.80 | -14.5% / -13.4% | -14.4% / -13.4% | 41.0% – 40.9% |
Toshiba | 18.30 – 18.70 | -13.3% / -11.4% | -11.3% / -9.3% | 23.9% – 24.0% |
WDC | 26.90 – 27.30 | -10.8% / -9.5% | -26.1% / -25.0% | 35.1% – 35.1% |
TOTAL | 76.60 – 77.80 | -12.9% / -11.6% | -18.3% / -17.0% | 100% – 100% |
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But.. but... my magnetic tape

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I expect this trend to continue for the next 5-10 years. Unless they come up with some new technology that improves performance. I can see hybrid drives becoming more popular as a stepping stone for people who want SSD-like performance but still want a lot of storage.
SSD's will see the same decline soon as NVME becomes the new standard.
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But but, I just bought three hard-drives and it still declines? :O
joking
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I expect this trend to continue for the next 5-10 years. Unless they come up with some new technology that improves performance. I can see hybrid drives becoming more popular as a stepping stone for people who want SSD-like performance but still want a lot of storage.
SSD's will see the same decline soon as NVME becomes the new standard.
Hybrid is in rather bad spot. You don’t need storage for movies and music. Most games and software can be fit in 500GB SSD.
It always wiser to separate drives between usage. Unless there very specific use cases.
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For actual long time storage and backups i will still use HDDs, and that's not going to change.