On January 14, market research agency Trendfocus released data showing that the global shipment of HDD mechanical hard disks in the Q4 quarter of 2021 was only about 64.7 million pieces, down about 4.3% compared with the Q3 quarter and nearly 10% compared with the fourth quarter of 2020. The overall sales continue to maintain a downward trend, is the mechanical hard disk to be eliminated?
It is understood that there are only three manufacturers left in the current mechanical hard disk market, namely Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba. In the Q4 quarter, Seagate shipped about 27.7 million units, with a market share of about 42.9%, ranking first in the world, but shipments fell by about 8.8% year-on-year.
Western Digital shipped about 24 million yuan in the quarter, down about 8.3% year-on-year, with a market share of 37.1%; Toshiba shipped about 13 million blocks, down about 13.2%, the worst decline among the three manufacturers, and the market share also fell to 20%.
From the data, it can be found that many hard disk manufacturers around the world have withdrawn from the mechanical hard disk market, such as Samsung, Kingston, Lexa and so on. Mechanical hard disk manufacturers continue to decrease, sales have also fallen sharply, according to the current development situation, perhaps in a few years mechanical hard disk may really withdraw from the consumer market.
Why is the obsolescence of mechanical hard disks so fast, and are mechanical hard disks really so bad to use? In Xiao Lei's view, there are indeed many shortcomings in the current mechanical hard disk, such as large size, harsh use environment, slow reading and writing speed, and large power consumption and noise. Its original capacity and durability advantages are gradually being diluted with the rapid development of solid-state drives. At this stage, SSDs do smell better.
In recent years, the price of solid-state drives has been declining, and the price of 1TB of SSDs with mainstream M.2 interfaces is about 650 to 750 yuan, and 1GB is less than a dollar. At the same time, the read and write speed of SSDs is also greatly improved than before, the failure rate is greatly reduced, and the user experience is significantly improved. Therefore, consumers prefer to choose to experience a better SSD rather than a mechanical hard drive.
But the mechanical hard disk is not without advantages, at the same price, its storage capacity will be several times that of the mechanical hard disk. For example, the mechanical hard disk of Toshiba and Seagate 6T is only about 800 yuan. For the same price you can only buy 1TB SSD. Therefore, if there is no high demand for storage speed, but a large storage capacity is required, the mechanical hard disk is still the best choice.