Hard drive sales fell 13% in the first quarter of the year

According to a Trendfocus report, hard drive sales fell nearly 13% in the first quarter of 2019, marking the disinterest that magnetic storage drives are stirring in favor of solid-state drives, though not the only reason.

Hard drive sales fell 13% in Q1 2019

The Trendfocus report indicates the sales of hard drives worldwide, which has fallen by almost 13%, which translates to 77 million units sold in the first three months of 2019.

Shipments of desktop hard drives are said to have fallen to just 24.5 million units, a drop of almost 4 million units from the previous quarter. Shipments of laptop hard drives decreased by more than 6 million units to reach the 37 million mark. However, business hard drives are said to have jumped nearly a million units to reach 11.5 million purchased in the quarter.

Visit our guide on the best hard drives on the market

These sales were likely to be affected by many factors. Seasonal buying patterns may help explain the decline in the laptop hard drive market, for example, and the desktop market is likely to be affected by the current shortage of Intel processors. Manufacturers are making fewer desktops, which means they need fewer such disks to install on those systems.

Either way, the simplest and cheapest component to upgrade on any PC today is storage. 120 or 240 GB SSDs are very cheap and offer much higher performance than a traditional hard drive. It is normal that users are leaning more and more towards them.

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