Tuesday, February 16th 2021

333 Million SSDs Were Shipped in 2020, Accounting for 207 ExaBytes of Storage

Today we have one interesting research in our hands. According to Trendfocus inc. we have come to know that as much as 333 million Solid State Drives were shipped last year, in 2020. The SSDs have finally overcome HDDs in the number of shipped units, with HDDs shipping 260 million units. In terms of total capacity shipped, HDDs are still winning. The average SSD has less storage capacity compared to the average HDD, thus making the total shipped capacity of all 333 million SSDs "just" 207 Exabytes (EB), while the total shipped capacity of HDDs is a bit over one Zettabyte (ZB).

The average capacity of SSD was as much as 0.67 Terabytes (TB), while the average capacity of HDD was around 4.0 TBs. This is exactly why HDDs are still present as much - simply because they can store much more storage and offer better value as the price per Gigabyte ratio is much lower than the one of an SSD. The SSDs are experiencing Year-over-Year growth of 20.8% in unit shipments, while HDDs are declining at the rate of 18%. When it comes to the total storage capacity shipped on yearly basis, SSDs are growing at the rate of 50%, with HDDs growing at a 13% rate. You can also check out the SSD share of different vendors below.
Source: Trendfocus
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18 Comments on 333 Million SSDs Were Shipped in 2020, Accounting for 207 ExaBytes of Storage

#1
W1zzard
Does that data look correct to anyone? I would say volumes on Intel and Micron are much bigger, Seagate bigger, Kioxia much smaller, WD smaller, Lite-On tiny,
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#2
TumbleGeorge
W1zzardDoes that data look correct to anyone? I would say Intel and Micron are much bigger, Seagate bigger, Kioxia much smaller, WD smaller, Lite-On tiny,
Global size of corporations does not correspond in the form of identical market percentages for each separate part of their business. Meantime Intel nand flash division was purchased from SK Hynix back in October 2020.
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#3
bug
I bet one of those exabytes isn't used for pr0n.
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#4
W1zzard
TumbleGeorgeGlobal size of corporations does not correspond in the form of identical market percentages for each separate part of their business. Meantime Intel nand flash division was purchased from SK Hynix back in October 2020.
Yeah I'm not saying "company size", but what I feel is the actual volume shipped, updated my original post
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#5
Wirko
bugI bet one of those exabytes isn't used for pr0n.
Metadata extracted from pr0n viewers also needs to be stored somewhere. 3,000,000,000 people x 300,000,000 bytes per person is about 1 EB, sounds about right.
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#6
kapone32
Which of the companies represents Adata?
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#7
billEST
1/2 666 : devil is coming
;)
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#8
Owen1982
I love SSDs but that's a lot of waste in 5-10 years when the flash dies. Where do 333 million SSDs actually end up?
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#9
bug
Owen1982I love SSDs but that's a lot of waste in 5-10 years when the flash dies. Where do 333 million SSDs actually end up?
On a farm where you can't visit, where else?

But I do own 5y+ old SSD that's still in pretty good shape. Probably less than 10% wear.
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#10
jardows
W1zzardDoes that data look correct to anyone? I would say volumes on Intel and Micron are much bigger, Seagate bigger, Kioxia much smaller, WD smaller, Lite-On tiny,
Remember that a large number of these shipments are to OEMs to include in their pre-built computer systems, not just retail shipments. Lite-On can be found in a lot of those. Seagate hasn't had a large SSD portfolio yet, and WD owns Sandisk and I think Toshiba SSD business now.
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#11
noel_fs
kapone32Which of the companies represents Adata?
adata is like a reseller, assembler would be more appropriate. So they could be using more than one of them, anyway my guess would be kioxia at least primarily or almost exclusively.
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#12
bonehead123
Just wondering if "SSD" includes m.2 nvme units, or only 2.5" SATA drives ?
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#13
ThrashZone
Hi,
SSD prices have gone down quite a bit in 2020 anyway if there truly is a shortage of memory chips in 2021 prices go up all bets are off beside occasional old ssd model dumps.
Posted on Reply
#14
Wirko
bonehead123Just wondering if "SSD" includes m.2 nvme units, or only 2.5" SATA drives ?
The HDD category includes everything, from datacenter to game consoles, apparently - Tom's has some more details. My best guess is that the SSD category also includes everything, which means both M.2 and 2.5" SATA, and all the non-consumer stuff too. Maybe even Intel's DIMM Optane Memory.
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#15
DeathtoGnomes
IDK about anyone else but I contributed 1.5GB on 2 SSDs to that chart. :D :cool:
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#17
kapone32
noel_fsadata is like a reseller, assembler would be more appropriate. So they could be using more than one of them, anyway my guess would be kioxia at least primarily or almost exclusively.
Thanks for the input as their XPG and SX lines are some of the most popular on Amazon.ca and the RAM is usually very aggresively priced as well with a ton of choices.
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#18
billEST
Owen1982I love SSDs but that's a lot of waste in 5-10 years when the flash dies. Where do 333 million SSDs actually end up?
ssd have a retention from 6 month to 1 year : lost information after ..... there is no stockage in ssd for long terme
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