Time's up for HDD PCs

Meteoric rise of SSDs means new laptops featuring HDD as their primary storage will be non-existent by the end of the year, analyst Context predicts

In less than 12 months, no new laptop will be sold in Western Europe with a hard disk drive (HDD) as its primary storage.

That's according to analyst Context, whose figures show 93.3 per cent of new laptops sold in the final quarter of 2019 had SSDs as their primary storage component, up from 66.7 per cent at the end of 2017.

The equivalent figure for desktops has - somewhat unexpectedly - rocketed from 48.5 to 82 per cent during the same period thanks mainly to tumbling SSD prices.

Context tracks units sold through top western European IT distributors.

"The sharp fall in price per gigabyte observed in 2019 is the main driver of accelerating SSD adoption as it enables vendors to sell SSD configurations at competitive prices", said Gurvan Meyer, business enterprise analyst at Context.

"Meanwhile, online storage services are getting cheaper, and the use of streaming online services more common, so there is less need for high-capacity local storage. Vendors can therefore sell models with less storage and this, too, is supporting the transition towards SSDs. And, last but not least, the majority of consumers have now experienced the advantages that SSDs bring to day-to-day computer use so are happy to pay a little more for a machine with this type of storage."

Thanks to these trends, it is "pretty safe to say" that no new laptop sold in Western Europe will have HDD as the primary storage component "by the end of 2020", Context said, adding that the desktop segment is set to follow suit in 2021.

Although only 9.9 per cent of PCs sold in the UK in Q4 contained HDDs, SSD adoption has been swifter in other European countries including the Netherlands, which already boasts a near HDD-less PC market already (see chart above). The transition in southern Europe, where average SSD adoption rates stand at 85 per cent, has been slower.