News - Rising market for SSDs fails to halt decline in storage industry

[HEXUS]

The whole industry slid five per cent despite a near-doubling in sales of Solid-State Drives.

Read more.

[moeburn]

Oh for god's sake. Look, investors, just because a company doesn't make MORE money every year, DOESNT MEAN IT HAS FAILED AS A BUSINESS! It's like if you work at a BBQ store, and the one month of the year when people don't really buy BBQs is answered with "you're not selling BBQs well enough!". Ever hear of dividends? It's where a company that stays the exact same every year, without growing, and still pays you, the investor, money.

This incessant greed is killing capitalism.

[DemonHighwayman]

One could argue that capitalism is killing itself !

[3dcandy]

Communism is the way forward then?
ODD sales are plummeting, I know many people (myself included) who have one and rarely use it...

[samuraiweasel]

I think they count ODD's among all drives shipped, and so with the decline in optical media, its obvious that number of units shipped is lower. And the state of the ecnomy doesnt help much either.

[jonny4288]

not surprising with the capacities available now, would think it was hard enough to fill for most users needs

[shaithis]

I think the cloud could be having the largest effect TBH.....and:

IHS report only includes computer-related drives and excludes sectors such as automotive, industrial, gaming, external storage, video surveillance and set-top box/DVR machines

Discounting all those has to skew the figures quite a lot.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The other thing is HDD prices are still higher for 2TB drives than they were a few years ago,and the warranties are lower too.

[Crowl]

I think the cloud could be having the largest effect TBH.

The cloud probably has a fairly minor impact on sales, the combination of fairly low prices on high capcity drives and the increase in the use of streaming services like Netflix means that there is simply less need for people to be buying additional drives unless one fails or they are making an upgrade to SSD.

[Lee H]

Blame things like netflix. Instead of being dirty pirates and downloading the files/films, we're seeing them move to legal streaming systems.

Anyway - got to dash, I need to buy another 2 250GB SSD drives to add to my 4 SSD drives I've already got

[Mama Sumae]

And shouldn't it?

2TB drives have been out for a while and contrary to some game developers best efforts are still more than most users will need. Speed wise SSD's are still more of a desired improvement than a need, so obviously the market will be saturated and will continue to be so unless requirements increase or storage devices lifespan decrease (I am looking at your new warranties Seagate ) .

I think the cloud could be having the largest effect TBH....

I am pretty sure those clouds will still consist of something a little more mechanical than water

But I agree, streaming services such as Netflix, Spotify, Steam and so on should have definitely reduced the amount of locally stored content. Even more pressing all of these have an invested interest that file formats do not increase frivolously in the future.

[Myss_tree]

Of course the day will come when just about all the free Cloud storage will be charged for. It will start as a small trickle (odds on it will be Apple) then others will follow.
There is possibly a market still at the moment for a 2TB+ 3.5" HDD with a 120/240GB nand flash tacked on similar to Seagates Momentus and WD's Caviar Black particularly in the slowly growing small form factor market.

[devBunny]

I suspect that a significant minority of retail customers are reluctant to pay higher prices after the years of wait-and-the-price-will-drop that we've enjoyed. For me, the cheapest 3TB, at £80, is close to, but still above, what I got my last pair of 2TBs for (£50 each, £25 per TB). I'll stay in price-watch mode for a bit longer unless dwindling free space forces my hand. If the 4TBs (£125) would like to reach £100 first then I'll bag a couple of them instead. ;-)