That is to say, in the first quarter, the ratio of SSD to HDD sales was close to 3:2, which is not surprising, because in 2020 SSD sales are 28% more than HDD (by sales rather than capacity). According to the Trendfocus report, the three major hard drive manufacturers have shipped 64.17 million HDD hard drives in the first quarter of 2021. In terms of less than 10 mainstream SSD suppliers, they shipped 99.438 million SSD hard drives in the quarter.
Considering that many modern notebooks can no longer make enough space for hard drives (many desktops are equipped with SSDs by default), the high sales of solid state drives are not particularly surprising. And now consumers also put forward higher requirements for the running speed of the computer, so the use of SSD has become the basic configuration. Relatively speaking, there are very few new devices that use HDD as a boot disk.
However, although many modern PCs do not carry large amounts of data, NAS, internal servers, and cloud data centers do. This is where high-capacity NAS and nearline HDD come into play. These hard drives can store up to 18TB of data, and the average capacity of 3.5-inch enterprise/nearline hard drives today is about 12TB. Therefore, the sales volume of HDDs in GB greatly exceeds that of SSDs (288.3EB vs. 61.5EB).
At the same time, it should be noted that most data centers use SSDs for caching and HDDs for bulk storage, so it is impossible to build a data center based purely on solid-state storage (3D NAND) or hard drives.
Anyway, in terms of capacity, HDD wins. The total shipment of hard drives in the first quarter of 2021 was 288.28EB, while the SSDs sold in the first quarter can only store 66EB of data.
As customer and server adoption of solid-state drives is increasing, dollar sales of solid-state drives are also strong. The Research and Marketing Department estimates the SSD market in 2020 at 34.86 billion U.S. dollars, and predicts that it will reach 80.34 billion U.S. dollars by 2026.
