The attitude of hard disk drives makers to solid-state drives is well known: they claim that such devices can only serve certain niche markets and cannot really compete against HDDs. On Friday chief executive of Seagate went on to say that nobody uses SSDs as storage devices.
"There is no one that is using SSDs for storage," said Steve Luczo, chief executive officer of Seagate, during the earnings conference call with investors and financial analysts. "I mean, maybe at the margin for replacing boot drives… I mean, maybe one or three per cent of the hierarchy is SSDs for storage. Most of your flash product is actually not hanging off the storage bus, it is fast memory."
It is true that in desktops SSDs are primarily utilized as drives that are used to run operating system and frequently run applications, whereas large multimedia files are stored on high-capacity hard disk drives. In the datacentre, solid-state drives are used to store "hot" data, which essentially means that they are used for caching data that is accessed repeatedly.
However, it is also true that total available market of hard disk drives shrunk from 160 - 170 million units per quarter in 2010 - 2011 to around 110 - 111 million units in Q2 2015, based on estimates by Seagate and Western Digital. SSDs were of the key reasons why the number of hard drives sold per quarter decreased.