author: Bart Swiatek
SSDs Surpass HDDs in Terms of Sales
Analysts of Trendfocus Inc. presented a report on the SSD and HDD market. The former were more popular than the latter last year.
IN A NUTSHELL:
- 333 million SSDs and 260 million HDDs hit stores in 2020;
- The SSD market is growing rapidly, with sales up over 20%;
- HDDs continue to dominate in terms of total storage sold - all of the HDDs shipped to stores last year had a total capacity nearly five times greater than the SSDs shipped to distributors.
According to analysts at Trendfocus Inc. 333 million SSDs were delivered to stores in 2020 (via Storage Newsletter). The number is interesting in that it is exactly 73 million higher than a similar statistic describing traditional hard disk drives (HDD). The newer standard of media has thus become more popular than the older technology.
Unfortunately, SSD devices still offer less space than HDDs sold for comparable money, so if we were to measure the total amount of storage space instead of the number of devices, old type drives would have a very big advantage. The total capacity of all SSD media shipped to stores last year is 207 exabytes (211,968 petabytes, or 217,055,232 terabytes). This compares to just over 1 zettabyte, or nearly five times the capacity of HDDs (1 zettabyte equals 1024 exabytes). The average capacity of an SSD purchased last year was 0.67 terabytes, while HDDs purchased in the same period offered an average of 4TB of space.
It is worth noting that the SSD market is growing dynamically - across the year sales increased by 20.8%, while interest in HDDs dropped by 18% (we are still talking about devices shipped to distributors). Also of interest are statistics showing changes in the amount of space purchased by SSD and HDD customers. Over the past 12 months, HDD buyers have purchased 13% more storage space, but over the same time period, the total space purchased on SSD media has increased over 50%.
Everything indicates that within a few years HDD technology will be ousted from the mainstream market by the newer and faster solution.