mood Posted February 16, 2021 Share Posted February 16, 2021 SSD shipments outpaced HDDs in 2020, but capacity still favors mechanical drives 2020 was a banner year for solid-state drives Why it matters: Solid-state drive shipments surpassed those of traditional hard drives by a significant margin in 2020 but spinning media retained the crown in terms of overall capacity served. As pricing continues to plummet and capacity increases, we can expect to see the ratio become even more skewed. According to data storage research and consulting firm TrendFocus (per Storage Newsletter), manufacturers shipped 333.12 million solid-state drives in 2020 – an increase of 20.8 percent year-over-year. Hard drive shipments, meanwhile, were down 18 percent annually to 259.81 million units. Doing some quick math, we see that 28 percent more SSDs versus HDDs were shipped last year. Total SSD capacity was around 207.39 exabytes compared to 1,018.32 exabytes for hard drives. One exabyte equals a billion gigabytes. Narrowing the scope to Q4 reveals that 87.453 million SSDs were shipped, mostly courtesy of Samsung and Western Digital. The next closest competitors - Kingston, Kioxia and SK Hynix - shipped half as many drives as Western Digital. (Q4 2020 SSD shipments and capacity) For years, I’ve been telling anyone who would listen that a solid-state drive is arguably the single best general performance upgrade you can perform on a computer. Early SSDs were prohibitively expensive but pricing has come way down in recent years, and even more so as of late due to continued NAND flash oversupply. These days, you can pick up a basic SATA III 240GB Kingston SSD for just $30. Source: SSD shipments outpaced HDDs in 2020, but capacity still favors mechanical drives Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arachnoid Posted February 16, 2021 Share Posted February 16, 2021 Linus Tech Tips just posted a video of an SSD with 15TB capacity for $15,000 the main drawbacks being its read/write speed of only 550MB/s and a write life span of only 256 TBs just posted a video of one with 15TB of capacity the main drawback being it read/write speed Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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