More SSDs Shipped than HDDs in 2020

Peter_Brosdahl

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StorageNewsletter.com has reported that SSD shipments exceeded HDD shipments in 2020. Over 333 million SSDs were shipped compared to 260 million HDDs in 2020. Something unusual happened in the enterprise sector, however: shipments of SAS SSDs declined by over 30 percent. This may be due to increased inventory and less demand. Total NAND capacity shipments also increased by 12 percent quarter over quarter, with SSDs consuming 45 percent of all NAND shipped.



Samsung led in Q420 with over 26 percent of total units shipped worldwide, accounting for over 32 percent of storage capacity. That equates to over 22 million units totaling nearly 18 exabytes of storage. The closest competitor was WDC with 20.3 percent shipped (15 percent storage capacity). Other...
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Burticus said:
Great. Now to get the costs down even more....
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I already don't want QLC drives, so I hate to see what they would do to drop cost even more. Instead of dropping prices, can we get better QD1 performance and lower latency? Maybe start moving back to performance optimized 512GB SLC drives?
 
Zarathustra said:
About time.

Please tell me this includes mass storage enterprise drives? because if this is just consumer, that is really bad.

IT guy at work bought me a new laptop in 2017, and it had an effing 5400rpm 2.5" hard drive in it. I was fuming.
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Oh man, I'll bet that's right. 5400 spinner is stupid slow and shouldn't ever be used as a main drive in this day and age.
 
Peter_Brosdahl said:
Thanks but I forgot to mention PCIe 4.0. I got excited and thought why haven't I seen this before and then remembered that. Still decent prices though. :)


edit: If I do end up getting an Intel based laptop this year(I've been researching RTX 3060/3070 ones) that'll be a great upgrade!
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Last year I got a Samsung 860 QVO 2Tb drive for 150€ on an amazon sale, still have to put it in a PC but for me as a game drive it is good enough, already have one in use, can't complain about it, time to get rid of my "storage" spinner which is actually a WD black 2Tb drive
 
The last spinners I purchased were 300GB velociraptors in... 2008(?). I had 5 - 3 for OS with matrix raid split between raid 0 for OS and raid 5 for other storage, and 2 in raid 0 for games. Everything since has been ssd - I can’t even imagine using something with a 5400rpm drive today *shudder*
 
I've still got a few platters around the house. Pretty sure I've got an 8 TB WD Red in a Kodi box but not positive on the size. Then I got a good deal on a white label 6 TB years ago that's used for some overall media storage in an old rig along with a 3 TB for the same. That's pretty much it though. I've been phasing them out for a while now. I've also got this freaky MSI GT80 Titan laptop that has 4 x 512 GB NVME drives in 2 x RAID0 configurations plus a hybrid 3 TB drive. It's a bit of a mobile server of sorts. Even has 2x 980m in SLI. At this point, that'll go to the wife when I get a new laptop.
 
Zarathustra said:
About time.

Please tell me this includes mass storage enterprise drives? because if this is just consumer, that is really bad.

IT guy at work bought me a new laptop in 2017, and it had an effing 5400rpm 2.5" hard drive in it. I was fuming.
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Well, they said enterprise sales are down but mostly attributing it to some already having excessive inventory thus creating less demand.

I admit at my other job, with its very, very, limited budget we're stuck with platters but a man can dream . . .On the plus side, I did upgrade all the workstations and laptops to SSDs years ago back when we went to Windows 10. ;)

Our servers still do alright since they really don't have much to bring them down since nearly everything is document-based or streamed from the internet.

A 5400, ouch! Always feels good swapping one from a laptop. The boot-up alone is worth it.
 
Peter_Brosdahl said:
I've still got a few platters around the house. Pretty sure I've got an 8 TB WD Red in a Kodi box but not positive on the size. Then I got a good deal on a white label 6 TB years ago that's used for some overall media storage in an old rig along with a 3 TB for the same. That's pretty much it though. I've been phasing them out for a while now. I've also got this freaky MSI GT80 Titan laptop that has 4 x 512 GB NVME drives in 2 x RAID0 configurations plus a hybrid 3 TB drive. It's a bit of a mobile server of sorts. Even has 2x 980m in SLI. At this point, that'll go to the wife when I get a new laptop.
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You know, I forgot about my NAS when talking about spinning disk. I did buy 2x 12TB WD reds to run in a mirror for my general storage and to use a scratch space for work. I also migrated all of my velociraptors to that box, plus have one a friend gave me for a *massive* 1.8tb Raid 0 which I’m using for NFS storage for my raspberry pis. I really should just replace those velociraptors with a 2TB nvme drive and save power, but it’s pretty low priority.
 
Peter_Brosdahl said:
Thanks but I forgot to mention PCIe 4.0. I got excited and thought why haven't I seen this before and then remembered that. Still decent prices though. :)
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Why?

I get going with NVMe, cause that scales up to 3500MB/s from SATAs 550MB/s speed limit... but PCIe 4.0 isn't going to get you that bump, it's not going to lower latency outside of a very specific benchmark, and while you'll be able to see the extra speed when you use it, you're not really going to be able to use it that much.

Saying that as a friend, of course!

I just don't find the difference compelling enough to pay up for, or wait for. Once the data is in place, speeds stop mattering quite a bit at this level, and other parts become much more important, like having enough RAM and enough fast cores, and networking, and other connectivity, and so on.
 
Endgame said:
You know, I forgot about my NAS when talking about spinning disk. I did buy 2x 12TB WD reds to run in a mirror for my general storage and to use a scratch space for work. I also migrated all of my velociraptors to that box, plus have one a friend gave me for a *massive* 1.8tb Raid 0 which I’m using for NFS storage for my raspberry pis. I really should just replace those velociraptors with a 2TB nvme drive and save power, but it’s pretty low priority.
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Yup. Eight spinners in the NAS.

And actually bought two 8TB drives for the desktop to mirror for local 'scratch space'. I put downloads and game launcher download caches there as well as pictures older than three or four years so they're in the local Lightroom catalog if I need them, as well as stuff like local cloud storage copies and so on. Stuff that just doesn't need to be fast all the time. Even put games there I have installed but haven't played or won't play for a while as that's still faster than any residential internet connection!

Also, a word on QLC: when we're talking about terabytes of data, writing to a QLC drive is quite possibly going to be slower than writing to a spinner. Reads are the other way around of course, so QLC is still more than suitable for many read-heavy desktop workloads, including running operating systems (I have one laptop whose only drive is a 660p), but if you're intending to write quite a bit of data on a regular basis, pay up for something better. Or just get spinners if you're looking at >2TB.
 
I also wouldn't mind some cheap 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD's.

But, I'll still buy spinners for my media storage. Cheap, reliable and they sit there not spinning when not being accessed. Might upgrade my 4 TB spinners to 8 or 12 soon.
 
LazyGamer said:
Why?

I get going with NVMe, cause that scales up to 3500MB/s from SATAs 550MB/s speed limit... but PCIe 4.0 isn't going to get you that bump, it's not going to lower latency outside of a very specific benchmark, and while you'll be able to see the extra speed when you use it, you're not really going to be able to use it that much.

Saying that as a friend, of course!

I just don't find the difference compelling enough to pay up for, or wait for. Once the data is in place, speeds stop mattering quite a bit at this level, and other parts become much more important, like having enough RAM and enough fast cores, and networking, and other connectivity, and so on.
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Very true but mostly in anticipation of things that may(or may not) come down the road. I can say that I do see a slight decrease in load times for games with it, not as dramatic as the switch from platter to SATA III but it's there. I committed to the 1TB drive I have now when I did the build to see with my own eyes what it all breaks down to. With a 2TB 4.0 drive, I'll pretty much drop it in there and call it good for the bulk of the lifespan for this rig.
 
Peter_Brosdahl said:
Very true but mostly in anticipation of things that may(or may not) come down the road. I can say that I do see a slight decrease in load times for games with it, not as dramatic as the switch from platter to SATA III but it's there. I committed to the 1TB drive I have now when I did the build to see with my own eyes what it all breaks down to. With a 2TB 4.0 drive, I'll pretty much drop it in there and call it good for the bulk of the lifespan for this rig.
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Kind of why I went with dual 1 TB NVMe's, but they're 3.0. At the time the 4.0 drives were almost 3x more expensive, and reviews didn't really point to much, if any, benefit at the time. There still isn't much benefit to 4.0, unless you're transferring data between two 4.0 drives.
 
Riccochet said:
Kind of why I went with dual 1 TB NVMe's, but they're 3.0. At the time the 4.0 drives were almost 3x more expensive, and reviews didn't really point to much, if any, benefit at the time. There still isn't much benefit to 4.0, unless you're transferring data between two 4.0 drives.
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I admit I'm not sure what the real-world take away would be but now that those 3.0 NVMe drives are really beginning to drop I wonder what people are seeing with the PCIe RAID cards for them. I did a couple of stories on some about a year or so ago but haven't really heard much since. We all know that RAID SSDs don't usually see much benefit but with a card it could be a different story. I doubt I'll ever go that route though. SSDs in RAID is mostly pointless for games now, just like SLI. In the end simplicity wins out which is a good thing.
 
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