SSDs are now more popular than their mechanical counterparts in the consumer PC market. In the first quarter of 2021, HDDs were shipped with just over 31% of all the PCs sold, while SSDs accounted for close to 60%. The total number of PCs shipped in the first quarter reached 83.93 million units with just 35 million of them featuring HDDs, and the rest leveraging SSDs.
Seagate continued to be the leading HDD vendor, accounting for 42.9% of the overall HDD market, followed by WD (which includes Hitachi drives) with 36% and Toshiba with the remaining 21%. Interestingly, the presence of HDDs was more prominent in the laptop market compared to desktops. (Cialis) Hard drives accounted for just 23% of the storage market in the desktop space while in the mobile space, they were almost 50% more popular with an overall share of 31.40%. Furthermore, while all three vendors recorded a drop of 7-9% in quarterly revenue in the consumer market, the enterprise market saw a healthy growth of 19%, pretty much canceling the losses.
The increased adoption of SSDs comes as no surprise. As per the latest data shared by BlackBlaze, SSDs have a lower failure rate than HDDs due to a lack of moving components. The introduction of TLC and QLC NAND has significantly reduced the price of SSDs while 3D NAND has allowed for high-capacity drives on par with HDDs.
