Sales of ssd memories will exceed sales of hdd in 2021

According to a forecast made by the market research firm Statista, until 2021 the sales of SSD memories will exceed the sales of HDD hard drives.

No less than 400 million HDD units will be sold this year. However, until 2021 this figure will drop to 330 million HDDs sold annually, while shipments of SSD memories will go from 200 million registered this year to 360 million units sold in 2021.

360 million SSDs to be sold vs. 330 million HDDs

SSD vs HDD sales

Although HDDs today offer higher capacity, lower prices per GB, and longer life expectancy, SSDs are faster and consume less power.

On the other hand, HDD sales have been in free fall since 2015, when they recorded sales of 470 million units. A year later, in 2016, this figure fell to 425 million.

At the same time, the SSD units sold in 2015 were 105 million units, a figure that will triple until 2021 when sales of up to 360 million units are expected.

Although SSDs are still more expensive than HDDs, technological advancements have led to reductions in the price per GB of SSDs. Aside from the price, SSDs are also available in more compact sizes and can have the same memory capacity as an HDD but in a smaller case.

Also, the speed of SSDs has increased considerably over the past few years, especially thanks to the introduction of NVMe, which removed the 550 MB / s limitation imposed by SATA technology. This makes SSDs perfect for the server market.

The price difference between SSDs and HDDs is still very large today. In the Amazon store itself we can find a Maxtor 4 TB external hard drive at 116 euros, while a 4TB Samsung 850 EVO SSD reaches 1, 356 euros.