Global Hard Disk Drive (HDD) and Solid State Drive (SSD) Market Analysis and Processing Trends Report 2021

DUBLIN, May 27, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — The “The Hard Disk Drive (HDD) and Solid State Drive (SSD) Industries: Market Analysis And Processing Trends” report from The Information Network has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com’s offering.

This report focuses on the entire hard disk drive market food chain, analyzing the markets for hard disk drives, substrates, and thin film heads. Solid State Drive markets are analyzed. Processing issues in the manufacture of each of these sectors is included and the report details the CMP and Lithography sectors of thin film head processing. Market forecasts of all sectors are detailed. 

Both SSDs and hard drives do the same job

They boot your system, and store your applications and personal files. But each type of storage has its own unique feature set. HDDs are considered a legacy technology, meaning they’ve been around longer than SSDs. In general, they are lower in cost and are practical for storing years of photos and videos or business files. SSDs got their name – solid state – because they have no moving parts. In an SSD, all data is stored in integrated circuits. This difference from HDDs has a lot of implications, especially in size and performance.

SSDs are more expensive than HDDs per amount of storage, but the gap is closing as SSD prices begin to drop. Disk drives are getting a capacity jump from the use of heat- and microwave-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) and a speed boost through dual read-write head technology.

However, SSD capacities are growing even faster. QLC (4 bits/cell) NAND adds 25 per cent more capacity, compared to current TLC (3bits/cell). And layer counts in 3D NAND are set to rise from the 64-layer mainstream and arriving 96-layer product to 128-layers and beyond.

HDDs still offer a cost advantage over SSDs, as HDD storage is as low as $0.03 per gigabyte. However, SSDs still have significant advantages, even at a higher cost per bit. SSDs benefit from improved performance (especially in the move from SATA to PCIe protocol), speed, lower power consumption, increased durability (no moving parts), and a smaller form factor. Indeed, even at multiple times the cost per bit, there are several use cases where the total cost of ownership in using an SSD is far lower than using an HDD.

Though the cost advantage of HDDs over SSDs is progressively narrowing, the need for cheap high-capacity storage in data centers will continue to support the demand for enterprise HDDs, which carry higher average selling prices and margins than PC HDDs. We expect the firm to benefit from an acceleration in cloud deployments and subsequent need for massive amounts of high-capacity storage. At present, SSD remains a costly product for high capacities and we anticipate that business-critical storage (“nearline” storage not needed for immediate access) will continue to be in the hands of HDD technology.

The ongoing supply and demand imbalances within flash have created a challenging pricing environment for major players. With Samsung, Intel, Micron, and SK Hynix there is also the risk that competitors will beat Western Digital to producing novel silicon products (such as Intel and Micron’s 3D XPoint) that further curb the firm’s ability to benefit from flash. Most importantly, despite the addition of SanDisk, Western Digital still relies on HDDs for the majority of its revenue. The attach rate for SSDs within PCs are increasing at a steady rate while HDDs are in secular decline themselves. Enterprise storage provides a significant opportunity for the firm in the near-term, with nearline or business critical storage demands increasing, but should energy efficiency concerns within data centers and hyperscale cloud players increase, this opportunity may quickly evaporate.

Key Topics Covered:

Chapter 1 The Disk Drive Market Infrastructure

Chapter 2 The Hard Disk Drive Industry

Chapter 3 The Solid State Drive Industry

Chapter 4 Recording Heads

Chapter 5 Processing Trends And Markets

Chapter 6 The Media Market

Chapter 7 The Substrate Market

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/1evqnd

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