It looks like the practicality of using 2.5-inch notebook hard disk drives (HDD) will soon come to an end. Market research firm, DRAMeXchange, expects the adoption rates of solid state drives (SSD) to surpass that of the dated notebook hard drives. That said, it’s worth noting that these are all merely based on forecasts by DRAMeXchange, which are made based on the SSD adoption rate trend.
Speaking of trends, the estimated SSD adoption rate in 2016 is recorded at 33%. This upward trend continues in 2017 and 2018, where the research firms expects SSDs to boast an adoption rate of 44% and 56% respectively. Interestingly, if DRAMeXchange’s forecasts were to materialise, mobile HDDs would, for the first time, be overtaken by another storage standard.
Due to the nature of SSDs, there is a swathe of benefits compared to traditional hard drives; the most obvious being their significantly faster data transfer speeds. In addition, prices of SSDs are falling continuously; which is something that has been happening for a while now. Who knows, one day, we might even see SSDs being priced slightly lower compared to mobile HDDs in the near future. That aside, SSDs are also favoured due to their form factors; not only is this beneficial for portable devices, but also for desktop PCs as well.
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Whilst this would be good news for general users like ourselves, one can’t help but think about the negative implications that would take place once the adoption rate of SSDs surpasses notebook HDDs. One that comes to mind is the fate of dozens of existing employees working for HDD manufacturing giants such as Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba. Alas, in the words of Gellert Grindelwald, perhaps it is “for the greater good”.
(Source: DRAMeXchange via Overclock3D)
