Why the hard drive threatens to disappear as soon as 2023

• Hard drives kept a price advantage especially for so-called “cold” storage, but this is less and less true
• Models 2TB capacity and below are expected to be the first to fall off the shelves as their profitability for manufacturers plummets
• A study shows that old hard drives still have an advantage in terms of durability and resistance…

According to several analysts, hard drives should begin to phase out as early as 2023 – against a backdrop of falling prices for SSD storage, and plummeting profitability, especially for hard drives under 2 TB. The situation is still worse for miniature hard drives in 2.5″ format below this capacity.

Trendforce predicts that the average price of NAND flash memory in SSDs and microSD cards will drop 15% in the quarter, rendering these HDDs obsolete. In recent years, however, each type of storage seemed to have given itself a role. Slower mechanical hard drives were becoming the format of choice for medium-term, so-called “cold” data storage – due to the technology’s rock bottom price per gigabyte, and the resilience of these technologically very mature.

SSDs are killing hard drives

On the other hand, SSDs were geared more toward demanding home consumers, gaming, high-end data center applications, and video editing—applications where the higher price per gigabyte is secondary. Conventional hard disks thus seemed doomed to marriages of Chinchilla (the first hard disk indeed reached the market 67 years ago, in 1956), Granite, Larch, Platinum or even beyond, probably until at the Oak…

But the price of memory chips has fallen so much that these mechanical devices no longer meet long storage requirements as much as before. To the point that we can even now speak of demand in free fall. Since the start of January 2023, hard drive sales have fallen 40% – and you know that trend is set to continue as the price of solid state storage memory drops.

Especially since the price of SSD chips is falling very quickly at the moment, to the point that manufacturers like Micron and Kioxia are reducing their production to avoid flooding the market with too cheap SSDs. These players are also being pushed to abandon small storage capacities to focus on more powerful, efficient and large modules.

Of course, the appeal of classic hard drives has not quite disappeared yet, and we know that the largest storage capacities will remain available for sale for some time to come. But storing data on hard disks rather than SSDs, even when the latter are larger than 10 TB, will inevitably fall into disuse.

To give you an idea, in 2023, a 10 TB internal disk costs between 200 and 350 €, against less than 500 € for many SSD alternatives (8 TB most often)… Hard disks remain less expensive, but count- given their advantages, there are fewer and fewer reasons not to opt for SSDs – while these funds are “more expensive” without being horribly so until recently.

Memory cards under 256 GB are also at risk of disappearing

The price comparison would probably have given you cold sweats even 5 years ago. The price difference remains significant for large capacities, but the difference is rapidly closing. Trendforce also states that microSD cards with low storage capacity will experience the same fate. 32 and 64 GB cards are also in danger of disappearing from the market, as 256 GB memory chips have never been so affordable.

Obviously, It’s hard not to point out the advantages of SSD storage over HDD storage. For data centers, the first advantage, before the transfer speed, is clearly their reduced energy consumption. They also have incomparably faster access times (and throughput) and high shock resistance – and these components are also not sensitive to magnetic fields.

Hard drives remain a better choice for reliability for now, at least when they’re stationary – even if the gap tends towards an imminent crossing of the curves. Incidentally, it seems that the fall in prices in recent years and the increase in capacity and performance have been accompanied by a drop in the reliability of conventional HDDs. Secure Data Recovery, a Los Angeles-based data recovery company, studied 2,007 damaged or defective hard drives.

According to this study, older hard drives are actually more durable and resilient overall than new ones. The five most durable hard drives from each manufacturer surveyed were manufactured before 2015, while the least durable were manufactured after 2015. Secure Data Recovery suggests that the drive for increased performance and new technologies like overlapping magnetic recording ( SMR) could explain the decrease in reliability of recent hard drives.