2022 was clearly a dark year for hard drives. Indeed, their sales decreased by almost half. This is due to a big drop in demand from companies specializing in cloud storage and increasingly aggressive SSD prices!
35 to 36 million hard drives shipped in 2022!
Can we say that HDDs are dying? Perhaps. Indeed, 2022 was a black year for mechanical storage as the three big players in the market saw their shipments decrease by at least 40%! The worst was for Seagate whose shipments dropped by 43.7% from 2021 to 2022. Nevertheless, other companies such as Western Digital or Toshiba are not doing much better. While the former sees its shipments down 43%, the latter is at 39.3%.
The cause behind this is of course related to the drop in demand for HDD. Obviously, the biggest consumers are less in demand, and one thinks of the companies specialized in cloud storage. Nevertheless, private users also want less, just look at the prices charged on 500GB SSDs and HDDs. Currently, you can get an SSD for the price of a hard disk. Even worse, ” high-performance” HDDs like WD Black are priced at 1TB SSDs.
Finally, forecasts for 2023 are not good either. TrendForce estimates that 96% of laptops will be equipped with SSDs in this new year, compared to 92% currently.
