The trendline doesn’t look good for hard disk drives

Feature In early May, independent digital storage analyst Thomas Coughlin shared news of falling sales and revenue in the first quarter of 2025, continuing a trend that started in around 2010. Coughlin cites data from that year showing around 600 million annual hard disk shipments.

In 2025 he thinks around 150 million units will make it out of factory doors.

Hyperscale datacenter operators will buy most of them and have become HDD manufacturers' largest customers. The Register understands cloud and social media outfits order giant batches of HDDs and that diskmakers tailor products to their needs.

Sales of hard disks to non-hyperscale businesses are therefore increasingly rare – and when they do buy, they eschew high-performance machines, according to Gartner VP analyst Julia Palmer.

"Buyers in the primary workloads (block storage) market are increasingly focusing on all-flash storage and exploring quad-level cell (QLC) SSDs as a more cost-effective flash option," she ...