HDD hard drives are taking the hit on the market. In the fourth quarter of 2022, sales of Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba nearly halved. In question, the demand for cloud storage at half mast for companies and the advent of SDDs.
Artificial intelligence is able to predict the death of your hard drive. But she hadn’t foreseen that the market itself would get bogged down in such a critical situation. As TrendFocus reveals, sales of hard drives fell drastically in 2022. And the three main manufacturers are affected by this collapse in orders.
On the side of Seagate, which has hegemony in the sector, the results are far from brilliant. Compared to the fourth quarter of 2021, sales fell by 43.7% in the fourth quarter of 2022. The same fight at Western Digital, which saw its sales fall by 43% during the same period. Toshiba fared only slightly better, with hard drive shipments down 39.3%.
To read > SSD or hard drive for external storage? We tested the most effective
Why are hard drives on the decline?
At the origin of these alarming figures for manufacturers, we should not point the finger at the effects of inflation or the shortage of components. According to TrendFocus, much of the blame lies with enterprise cloud storage demand which has largely melted, with shipments dropping to between 10 million and 11 million units in the fourth quarter.
The advent of SSDs also continues to ramp up, with mechanical drives becoming a rare commodity on laptops. According to MiniMachines, 92% of laptops were delivered with an SSD in 2022. And they should be 96% next year. While HDDs are prized for their large storage capacity, SSDs are renowned for their responsiveness and execution speed.
In doing so, manufacturers favor flash memory to the detriment of mechanical memory even on entry-level PCs. Despite the higher production costs induced by the SSD, manufacturers will catch up by responding to a clear customer need: to obtain increased responsiveness rather than more storage space.
