Mechanical hard disk has entered its 70th year, looking back on the wandering years

According to news from this site on January 20, since IBM launched the world's first digital hard drive, traditional mechanical hard drives have been ups and downs for nearly 70 years. Digital storage analyst Tom Coughlin teamed up with industry insider Tom Gardner to map the revenue of traditional mechanical hard drives since the late 1950s.

Note from this site: IBM released the world’s first computer hard drive in 1956, which was larger than a refrigerator. It weighs over a ton. It looks a bit like a massive cylindrical air conditioning unit. Known as the IBM305RAMAC, short for "Random Access Computing Control," this groundbreaking hard drive took the tech world by storm when it finally arrived in 1956 after five years of research and development by IBM.

This chart combines multiple data sources such as Montgomery Phister. You can see the annual revenue of the mechanical hard disk industry in the 1980s. Only then did we achieve breakthrough growth.

In the 10 years of the 1980s, annual revenue increased from about $4 billion to more than $20 billion; some growth was also achieved in the 1990s, but revenue was much less predictable and fluctuating Bigger too.

Industry revenue declined during the first half of the 2000s, but the market stabilized by the middle of the decade, according to observations by Gartner and TrendFocus And continued to grow, reaching a peak of approximately US$37 billion in 2012.

Coughlin noted that this may be related to the widespread flooding in Thailand the previous year, which caused hard drive prices to peak in 2012.

According to Coughlin, the hard drive industry's shipments peaked in 2010, with 651 million units shipped. By comparison, hard drive shipments in 2022 are only 172 million units, and 2023 shipments are expected to be approximately 127 million units, with a total capacity of less than 900 exabytes.

Hard drive revenue has been on a downward trend since 2012 due to the rise of solid-state drives, but that may change this year, as Coughlin believes that the growing demand for storage from artificial intelligence may push mechanical hard drives Revenue growth.

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