It seems that no one doubts that the decline of hard drives is certain, giving way to the isolated leadership of solid state drives (SSDs). And now there is another piece of news that reinforces this, as it has been revealed that the sale of HDDs has fallen by 35% in the first quarter of this year, 2023.
HDD drives: Sales down 35% in Q1 2023
It is not exactly a novelty that consumers currently prefer SSD drives over HDDs. The consequences of this reality are obvious and, as we revealed here, the sale of HDD discs has fallen to almost half during the year 2022.
More recently, data released by the storage analysis firm Block and files (based on TrendFocus analysis) shows that the sale of HDDs in the first quarter of 2023 decreased by 35% compared to the same period last year. The details indicate that the most affected sector is that of hard drives aimed at the business market and cloud storage, where the drop was 54.3%. The market for 2.5'' hard drives for portable computers was the second most affected, with a decrease of 33%, as shown in the following table.
In terms of quantities, worldwide, 55.2 million HDD hard drives were shipped through the first quarter of 2023. If we go back to the data presented for the same period of 2022, it shows that 91.42 million units were shipped. The data estimates that Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital sold between 33.5 and 34.9 million units in the first three months of this year.
Seagate is still the leader in the HDD market and will have sold between 15 and 15.5 million hard drives in the first quarter. Western Digital will have sold between 12.2 and 12.7 million copies and Toshiba may have only sold between 6.3 and 6.7 million hard drive units.
These declines in HDD sales should come as no surprise, especially since 87% of our readers indicated in one of our latest surveys that SSD drives are the best choice on the market right now. However, hard drives are still preferred for some contexts, especially long-term and for backups.