Market Views: HDD Shipments Down 20% in Q1 2016, Hit Multi-Year Low
by Anton Shilov on May 12, 2016 8:00 AM ESTAverage HDD Capacities Continue to Increase
Despite the drop in HDD unit shipments, both sequentially and year-over-year, total capacities shipped by the two leading makers of hard drives increased in Q1. Seagate supplied 55.6 EB (Exabyte) of HDD storage last quarter, up from 54.6 EB in Q1 2015, but down from 60.6 EB in the previous quarter. The total capacity of Western Digital’s HDDs shipped in the first quarter of 2016 was approximately 62.2 EB, a moderate increase from 61.3 EB in Q1 2015.
When it comes to hard drives, one thing that has been growing quarter-over-quarter for a long time now is average HDD capacity, particularly in the enterprise segment, but not only there. In Q1 2016, an average drive could store around 1.4 TB of data, an increase of 28.5% (Western Digital) and 29.7% (Seagate) from the same quarter last year.
Average HDD Price Stays at $60 compared to Q1 2015
Despite the local price hikes by HDD makers, the industry can clearly produce more hard drives than it can consume, which is why prices of mass HDD models remain rather low. This will likely change in the future, when consumers shift to higher-capacity drives because of 4K UHD video or other reasons, but right now an average HDD from either Seagate of Western Digital costs approximately $60.
This will likely change after Seagate implements its plans to cut down its manufacturing capacities and supply-demand balance of the market will stabilize. However, it remains to be seen how significantly that is going to change going forward.
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darkfalz - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
Waiting for external drives of 8 or 10 TB (not SMR). Then I'll buy a couple more.takeshi7 - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
They've had non-SMR 8TB drives for a while now, and you can buy a 10TB non-SMR drive right now.http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Enterprise-Capacity-...
DanNeely - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
External drives are the cheap low RRM, low duty cycle models. Helium has only be used in the eye searingly expensive enterprise drives.takeshi7 - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
You can get an 8TB non-SMR air based desktop drive and put it in an external enclosure, but honestly I'd save my money and just get the SMR drive. SMR isn't that bad for writing large sequential files, like videos, and reads are just as fast as a normal drive. Unless you're doing something really demanding SMR is fine, and if you are doing something demanding you'd be better off with some sort of expensive RAID setup, anyways.Lolimaster - Friday, May 13, 2016 - link
I would stick to at most a WD Blue 6TB until HARM finally arrives.15-20TB disks.
JimmiG - Friday, May 13, 2016 - link
SMR is almost a perfect match for the kind of massive media library or backups that you might use an HDD for these days. Unless you're modifying/overwriting data, the firmware will ensure that the data is written to "pristine" tracks. Even when you do modify data, there's the non-SMR buffer. There's the issue with RAID, but most RAID modes are a bad idea with >2TB drives anyway.90 million units is hardly a "niche" market, and HDDs will remain for many years to come. There's just no other option if you need to store more than a terabyte or two of data, especially when you don't actually need the superior performance of the SSD (such as media libraries and backups).
Wolfpup - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
I'm just nervous about reliability with those SMR drives. Maybe I'm concerned for no reason, but I feel like storage tech is fragile enough as it is.The SMR externals were like $220 or so for a Seagate, versus $350 for a "normal" drive (and then I had to buy an enclose). So far so good though, using them for a few months.
Wolfpup - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
Wowzers, 10TB? I didn't know that... I just bought 8TB Seagate NAS drives a few months ago. Almost double the price of the SMR drives, but I'm just nervous about those.Wolfpup - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
Segate JUST released 8TB internal drives. I bought an enclosure that can hold 4 drives, + 2 8TB drives. They're...umm...I guess they're considered NAS drives. They were like $350 a piece though, something like that, but I need every scrap of space I can get, and I didn't really trust that new SMR tech.NeatOman - Thursday, May 12, 2016 - link
I try to never use a mechanical HDD when ever i can, and now that SSD's are $60 for 250GB and come with 3 or 5 year warranties its perfect. Most people will never fill a 250GB drive with just pictures and music. But i still recommend using a HDD as a backup and only using while backing up.