This is an interesting question. That’s because, today it is not easy to predict the fate of the hard drive industry and the production of these products.
When you look at the kind of hard drives that are currently in production, and examine this situation with economics in mind, I think it would be safe to say that regular hard drives are here to stay. Essentially, as long as there is a demand for a product, it normally holds a place in the market. There are exceptions, but this is the norm.
What about CD, DVDs, Blu-ray
You could remind me that CDs, DVDs, and high-capacity disks are all obsolete and that no one uses them anymore. Well, you would be right, however, hard drives are a completely different matter. For example, a single CD or DVD, or Blue Ray disk can only hold so much data. With the demands for space with today’s technology, these disc formats were dropped as they could no longer keep up with technology.
Hard drives present a very different storage solution. With the technology where it is today, hard drives can hold up to 22TB of data on a single drive. From a consumer point of view, that is a massive amount of data. Expect the capacities to keep increasing as time pushes forward. Also, as technology advances, it is safe to say there may be changes to drive construction. They may become smaller in size with thinner platters or the current format will remain but with more platters inside. Regardless of what direction hard drives take in the future, one thing is certain: they won’t be obsolete anytime soon.
Let’s look at PlayStation consoles for a moment. This type of technology has been around for a very long time. The PS1 was released in the mid 90s and PS5 just recently and when you look at it from an economic point of view, it doesn’t make good business sense for the company to jump ahead prematurely this is why it took that many years to advance. It could mean a loss of revenue in the billions of dollars. Now that is a big hit.
The same basic train of thought can be applied to hard drives. The tech has been with us for a very long time, as in capacities, and it just makes no sense to manufacture or release them before their time.
What about SSDs? Well, they have a different story and follow a different path in this game. Sure, similar views and similar paths, but SSDs are also not going to suddenly disappear. Yes, SSDs and hard drives are two different technologies but both still have a high demand and that will continue well into the future.
What if new cutting-edge technology introduces something amazing that is truly groundbreaking? Well, HDD and SSD will likely tag along and find their places in the market of the day. You know, much like CDs, DVDs, and the rest have.
Its not all dead
It may surprise you to know that roughly 40 to 50 percent of the population still buy CDs and DVDs. A total of 300 million DVDs are projected to be sold worldwide in 2023. Sure, that’s down considerably from the average of 2 billion DVDs sold each year between 2005 and 2009, but 300 million in sales does indicate there is still a demand for them in the market.
That number is sure to increase as tech moves forward and the current formats become more of a rarity, like vinyl records. Believe it or not, the production of vinyl records has increased to numbers beyond belief. Collector demand has fueled this increase with many independent labels appearing in the market to meet the demand.
Please share with me your thoughts on this topic as it keeps resurfacing.