This will be the first in a series of three blogs on advances in digital storage and memory and the systems built with these technologies and how that will impact the storage industry going into 2021. This initial blog (as prior years’ projections blogs) will discuss advances in magnetic recording, which have enabled magnetic hard disk drives and magnetic tape recording.
HDD shipments into several markets continues to decline as SSD prices are low with an oversupply of NAND flash in the market. Currently client SSDs are less than 5X the price of HDDs per TB and at that price point and with many applications such as most client PCs comfortable with 1-2 TB of storage, SSDs are an attractive option (often with more storage in the cloud). As a consequence, SSD are increasing as a percentage of PC storage. Likewise, HDD shipments continue to decline in consumer and performance enterprise applications (e.g. the move by gaming consoles to SSDs rather than HDDs on the latest models).