Everything indicates that you are seeing the last days of hard drives, at least as the majority storage system.

Hard drives have been a key part of computing since those early 10 MB models that appeared in the 80s.

Today they are still widely used as mass storage systembut its decline is a fact, and it seems that it is definitive.

A key fact: in the second quarter of 2022 only 45 million units have been sold worldwide. In the same period of 2010, 162 million units were sold. But it’s not just the amount. Also, the rapid drop:

This table published by the web Storage, is very revealing. She tells us that sales in the second quarter of 2022 fell between 12 and 16% across all manufacturers, compared to last year. The drop is from 31 to 34% year over year.

At this rate, hard drives will soon become a niche product. Will they disappear completely? Not because massive and cheap storage systems will always be neededas are hard drives.

But yes they will no longer be installed on computers for everyday useand they will remain as an external mass storage system.

The table also shows us that the leading brand in sales is Seagate, which has around 45% of the market. It is followed by Western Digital (WD) with 37.2% and Toshiba with 18%.

What is this decline in hard drive sales?

First of all, to the evolution of SSDswhich have increased their capacity and their life cycle, and have lowered their price.

also to cloud usage, which means that more and more applications and data are stored on the Internet, instead of on the computer. Especially in the case of companies.

Many users have switched to mobile devicesfrom smartphones to tablets and other solutions, that do not use hard drives.

Finally, the end of the pandemic and the return to offices and institutes has reduced the demands of laptops for telecommuting, studies, or leisure in confinements