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  • Zak - Wednesday, March 2, 2016 - link

    Who makes Samsung drives then? Seagate?
  • Flunk - Wednesday, March 2, 2016 - link

    Yes, see "Note 1" above.
  • Ushio01 - Wednesday, March 2, 2016 - link

    Yep Seagate bought Samsung's HDD business years ago but licence the name.
  • ImSpartacus - Wednesday, March 2, 2016 - link

    I haven't read more than the first few paragraphs (yet), but I wanted to say that I'm really liking the "spirit" behind articles like this. It's a unique kind of topic that I don't see addressed by the "typical" sites that review hardware and product press releases.
  • Ushio01 - Wednesday, March 2, 2016 - link

    I'm not surprised client HDD shipments are dropping 128 and 256GB SSD's are cheap enough for even for $300-400 laptops and the only people the HDD makers can blame is laptop OEM's and there obsession with charging premiums for minimal storage upgrades.

    You still see laptops with 160GB and 250GB HDD's on sale for just as much as SSD equipped laptops. If computer OEM's had put 500GB or 1TB HDD's in there mid range laptops then at least the average person may have not gone so quick to SSD's with such low storage.
  • DanNeely - Wednesday, March 2, 2016 - link

    At $45/75 vs $25 at either capacity (using the prices from a Google search), upgrading to a similarly sized SSD has a cost the dwarfs the total margin on laptops in the $300-400 price class. Adding an SSD to a laptop in that price band instead of whatever the next "standard" marginal upgrade is might be a better return on user experience (for customers who don't actually need the extra space from the bigger HDD upgrade); but unless you can educate the clueless, they'll go for the option that makes a number bigger than smaller.
  • Mikuni - Monday, March 7, 2016 - link

    "there obsession"? what do you mean?
  • Gunbuster - Wednesday, March 2, 2016 - link

    Now just make platter drives for OS and 720p screens a punishable offense and we can get that up to a 75% drop.
  • jjj - Wednesday, March 2, 2016 - link

    But the overall market is going away.
    In PC not only they will lose share to NAND but the segment itself is going away.Foldable screens in mobile will hit PC sales hard and then glasses will end it.
    In CE they will lose more and more share and some key products like consoles might disappear too.
    In branded, NAND will be affordable enough for many users that don't need very large storage.Very soon a microSD card will be able to hold a few TB and not cost all that much.
    In enterprise it's not just about units but ASP too.
    In robots power and density will win over price per TB.
    The market is going away and doing so very soon, no segment is safe.
  • Michael Bay - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link

    >foldable screens in mobile will hit PC sales hard and then glasses will end it

    There must be an end to the delusion somewhere. Even yours.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link

    BWAHAHAHAHAHAHHA

    Thanks for the good laugh.
  • Murloc - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link

    yeah totally ignore the ergonomics
  • Space Jam - Wednesday, March 2, 2016 - link

    With prices on HDs boldly staying where they are its no surprise SSDs are cutting into the market. As enterprise-oriented SSDs grow in size, value and options, HDs are only going to have the screws put on them further.

    I can't wait for when SSDs force HDs to drop in price heavily and WD/Seagate/etc... are punished heavily for it going forward.
  • hlmcompany - Wednesday, March 2, 2016 - link

    What an odd comment. As SSD sales increase, so will the profit for WD and Seagate - they both own SSD companies. Also, consumer pricing for HDD's is not as relevant as it used to be, since HDD sales are shifting to cloud/datacenter storage.
  • jjj - Wednesday, March 2, 2016 - link

    Have you read the article? You can't say that empty line that cloud will save them , if you did.SSDs are eating that too and killing ASPs.
    As for Seagate making SSDs, no that won't save them. There is actual competition there and you don't make much money if you don't have your own NAND. WD is buying Sandisk and they will have a future, Seagate has no future at all at this point.
  • Jaybus - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link

    I don't think they can drop prices all that much. HDDs are intricate mechanical devices and the manufacturing process has been tweaked about as far as it can. The manufacturing cost cannot really be lowered, so the minimum possible HDD price is going to still be too high to compete with NAND in the not too distant future, not to mention other SSD technologies with even higher density potential.
  • Shiitaki - Friday, March 11, 2016 - link

    Punished heavily? There are actually parts in a spinning hard drive that are not made out of air. Unlike SSDs there are significantly more raw material required. That is why spinning herd drives are so heavy.

    I can remember spending 300 dollars for a 10GB hard drive, prices are already way down. They just seem more expensive because our economy sucks and our spending money has been shrinking.

    The Consumer PC industry has never been more affordable than now. The profit margins on the low end defy reasoning. Apple and Intel are the only ones making a reasonable profit margin on their products. PC manufactures make money by selling space on those low and mid range computers to software companies. All of that unwanted preinstalled software IS the profit margin.

    The PC industry is already being punished.
  • p1esk - Wednesday, March 2, 2016 - link

    Last month I bought two 5TB WD drives for my NAS. For $170 each.
    Guess what? In a couple of years when I fill them up with my home made 4k videos, I will probably buy hard drives again, unless SSD will match them in $/GB.
    The thing is, for long term storage, SSDs don't make any sense currently.
  • beginner99 - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link

    true. But I see a dark future. HDDs will go to a niche for storage of large media. Meaning you will probably only be able to buy enterprise drives as developing a second platform for consumers is not worth it anymore.
  • Samus - Wednesday, March 2, 2016 - link

    Great report! I look forward to reading these. Fantastic!
  • ltcommanderdata - Wednesday, March 2, 2016 - link

    http://blog.seagate.com/consumer/seagate-boosts-na...

    Seagate recent announced a 1 TB 2.5" SSHD with 32GB of flash. I'd be good to see some tests to see what the improvement is compared to the 8GB flash models and whether it's able to maintain more SSD-like performance. I think the simplicity of a single large disk is still preferred by most general consumers so there should definitely be demand for SSHDs if they can actually fulfill their hard drive-like capacity and SSD-like responsiveness promise.
  • Dr. Swag - Wednesday, March 2, 2016 - link

    Why is there this giant bump in hdd prices and a huge shipment decrease in 2011? Someone please enlighten me on why this is?
  • DanNeely - Wednesday, March 2, 2016 - link

    Severe flooding wrecked a number of the assembly plants.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Thailand_floods...
  • bill.rookard - Wednesday, March 2, 2016 - link

    Yup. Supply and demand. When all of a sudden you can't produce as many HDDs, the price tends to jump as SSD's hadn't really taken off at that point. Or - actually - they had started production of them but the costs were pretty astronomical for a nominally sized (sub 64GB) SSD.
  • Samus - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link

    I attribute SSD's recent success to the boost they got in the marketplace partially due to the crashed HDD market in 2011. I know that was when I bought my first one. It was a 64GB C300 for $100, well worth it.
  • beginner99 - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link

    Problem is price. Price has been stagnant for years. For my current rig I bough 2 TB Green drives for $99 each 5 and 3/4 years ago. Go look at prices of green drives now. They are around $83 here. So only $16 cheaper. A 6 TB green drive here is $248. That's $82 for 2 TB so you get 0 rebate for buying a bigger drive. This also means that price/GB hasn't changed much at all compared to over 5 years ago. Now look at what happened to SSD prices in the same time frame and you have an answer.

    Second point is that storage needs of average user (facebook, twitter, email, some pictures) compared to advanced users are getting more and more imbalanced. The former has troubles filling a 1 TB drive not to mention 2 TB. For advanced users they can't get enough, tons of pics, bluray rips, games, soon 4k content or crazy guys working with raw images and videos.
  • sheh - Wednesday, April 13, 2016 - link

    Here's a Toshiba 2TB for $70:
    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...

    And here's a Toshiba 3TB for $85:
    http://www.adorama.com/TO01ACA300.html
  • Gothmoth - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link

    I TELL YOU WHOS FAULT IT IS....

    the PC market is shrinking because INTEL is doing BABY steps and AMD is no competition at all.

    in the 90s i build a new PC every two years, because speed improvements were big enough to justify building a new PC.

    today i can still stick to an old sandybridge because INTEL is only focusing on GPU and energy consumption.

    10-15% more performance per CPU generation does not cut it.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link

    What do you need more CPPU power for? Unless you do 3d rendering or server-style number crunching, CPUs have been good enough for years.

    Meanwhile, energy consumption focus is getting laptops very close to mid range desktops performance wise, and the iGPU is needed to drive bigger screens.

    Even if zen can match skylake, what use is that power?
  • Shiitaki - Friday, March 11, 2016 - link

    My friend just built a dual core Skylake for his wife, it benches surprisingly close to his overclocked i5 2500K. Intel has been increasing performance, and if your software takes advantage of the new instructions or features, big gains.

    But no, the clock rate has not been going up very fast.

    I agree with you that replacing a computer every couple of years is no longer necessary. This is because software has stagnated. Processing power has finally saturated the needs of most people, you can play World of Warcraft on a 45 dollar Intel CPU and 110 dollar Nvidia graphics card.

    The differences between each generation of Graphics card, and the cpu and motherboard to support them, used to be noticeable. You could look at your friends new machine and see the difference. Now the difference between 'high' and 'ultra' isn't as obvious. And since most monitors only do 60 hz, and most people have learned to live with LCDs, high frame rates are wasted.

    It is nice I don't heat my room with my computer anymore, so I think Intel has been doing the right thing by bringing down the power usage so much. This enables using more computers without driving the electric bill up.

    I love being able to drag my 27" iMac places and plug in with one cord! Much nicer than when I was packing a 22" CRT, 50lb computer, and a box of cables.

    The utter and complete failure from Microsoft in the PC consumer space doesn't not help. There is NO LOVE for Microsoft from consumers. When asked 'Why should I upgrade to Windows 10?', none of my answers matter to them. Seriously, what does Windows 10 do for he end user that Windows 95 didn't do? Crash? Security?, anything else that people use? I'd try Cortana, but find the constant 'setup' Microsoft forces on everyone obnoxious. No, Siri does not require setup. Besides, a keyboard and mouse are much faster so voice control is not as useful on a desktop.

    That is the biggest reason why the PC industry is doing badly, Microsoft is doing what they want to do, ignoring their faults and ignoring the needs of the end user.

    Without software, it's just a box with blinking lights and switches.
  • Murloc - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link

    its not it's
  • jabber - Thursday, March 3, 2016 - link

    The secret going forward is learning to not tie yourself down with TBs of personal digital baggage. 99% of it is junk. Yes it is.
  • vortmax2 - Friday, March 4, 2016 - link

    Would love to see that same analysis on SSDs... ;)
  • kensiko - Friday, April 29, 2016 - link

    +1, Can you do that Anand ?
  • Al Del 001 - Monday, July 4, 2016 - link

    Looks like there is an inconsistency between the 2 first charts "Sales of HDDs Total" in year and in quarter. Looking at 2012, the sum of quarters is 147 + 157 + 139 + 136 leads to 579Mu and not 479Mu as reported in the yearly chart.

    Then, the report is very interesting!
  • rickytj - Monday, August 22, 2016 - link

    1) Do we have an estimate market share of SSD vs HDD for internal and portable storage?

    2) Also how does the cloud storage affect the HDD industry going forward? does data center still need to use HDD technology and components?

    Thanks!

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