As much as we'd like to be able to pick up a high performing 1TB or 2TB solid state drive for pennies per gigabyte, the market just isn't there yet. And since hard drives still offer oodles of storage at pauper level pricing, they must be flying out the factory door, right? Not exactly. We're still not at the crossover point where it automatically makes more sense to pick up an SSD over a mechanical HDD, but several factors are collectively playing a role in slowing global HDD shipments.
Sources entrenched in the HDD scene tell DigiTimes that worldwide hard drive shipments are expected to grow by just 3 percent in the third quarter and then remain flat in Q4. The switch to SSDs is one reason, but it's not the only one, at least not by itself.
HDD players also attribute the slowdown to rising demand for tablet PCs. Most slates use some form of NAND flash storage, and only a small number come with mechanical hard drives. That's not something that will ever change and the divide will grow even larger as more tablets make it to market.
Moreover, DigiTimes credits the slowdown to weakening economies in the U.S. and Europe, lower than expected demand from OEMs, and the aftereffects of the Japan earthquake back in March, which caused notebook players to stock up on HDDs in preparation for a possible shortage.
Comments are closed on this article
Modroneman
September 27, 2011 at 2:55pm
Hmm...Weird, because I just bought a 3TB HDD. Hey statisticians, what about me!
stoneyguy
September 27, 2011 at 11:19am
I'm surprised they didn't site cloud storage as one of the factors. No need in buying a larger hardrive for your movies or music anymore when you can just stream the contents now.
phoenixjc
September 27, 2011 at 11:42am
Because cloud storage isn't some magical place that stores your data in a mystical way. It is a server that you access over the internet. So "cloud storage" is actually good for hard drive manufacturers, because these cloud storage services will purchase old school mechanical hard drives (due to cost/capacity requirements).
Also, I don't want to put my Movies or Music on cloud based storage. At home, the validity of my media is for only me to know. On a server I have no idea who actually is looking at that data. Also, if my internet goes down, or the cloud storage provided has an outage, I don't have access. I also know that I am not the only one with these concerns.
With the shift to tablets, the current PC saturation level, and the lack of any huge revelations in computers in the last 4 years (mostly just minor to moderate performance increases that don't apply to what the majority do with their computer,) I am not all that surprised by the slowdown. Now all I can do is hope that the supply and demand economics cause the price to fall so I can stock up on storage.
zaeentech
September 27, 2011 at 11:08pm
Me too is waiting for the price to fall so that I can support my home storage with an additional back-up solution. My guess only movies & HD contents will create demand for these storage in the consumer space in future.
Coldrage
September 27, 2011 at 10:37am
About time we got rid of this ancient technology and focused all innovations on bringing SSD prices down, their storage and longevity up.
LatiosXT
September 28, 2011 at 8:28am
If you want to bring SSD longevity up, you have to make them bigger. And I don't mean data size wise. I mean transistor wise. The mechanisms for Flash Memory are basically physically changing the properties of the transistor, which you can only do so much (hence the limited write cycles). The smaller the transistor, the less durable it gets.
I've heard claims that 22nm Flash is down an order of magnitude in terms of write cycles (something like 50,000 to 5,000), which makes sense.
Flash Memory really is only good for Write Few, Read Many applications.
I'd say we focus the money on researching memoristor memory and switching technology.
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