By the end of 2020, no new laptop in Western Europe will be sold with hard disk drive as primary storage
London, 13th February 2020 – The adoption of SSDs for primary storage accelerated during the fourth quarter of 2019 as the volume of HDD PCs – notebooks, desktops and workstations – sold through the Western Europe (WE) IT distribution channel fell to 9.4%, according to the latest data published by CONTEXT, the IT market intelligence company.
As expected, 93.3% of new laptop PCs sold in Q4 2019 had SSDs as their primary storage component, up from 66.7% at the end of 2017.
More surprisingly, SSDs are also increasingly being used in desktops with the proportion of new devices using them reaching 82% at the end of 2019, up from 48.5% in 2017.
The adoption of SSDs is fastest in Nordics and The Netherlands which had an almost HDD-less PC market by the end of 2019 with the components used in only around 2% of PCs, inclusive of laptop and desktop. Germany follows – there, SSD share of the overall PC market is 93.4% – and the UK completes the podium with only 9.9% of PCs sold in the country in Q4 2019 containing HDDs. The transition is slower in Southern Europe where an average of 85% of PCs sold at the end of 2019 came with SSDs.
“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.”
Given these trends, it is pretty safe to say that, by the end of 2020, no new laptop sold in WE will have HDD as the primary storage component – and there’s not much doubt the desktop segment will follow closely in 2021.
About CONTEXT
CONTEXT’s market intelligence, performance benchmarks and opportunity analysis empower clients to optimise operations and accelerate tomorrow’s revenues. With over 35 years of industry partnership and experience reporting on large datasets, CONTEXT delivers analytics at all points in the value chain, providing clients with actionable insights rooted in concrete data and a profound understanding of customer needs. CONTEXT is headquartered in London, with over 300 staff across the world and in 2019 was recognised as one of the UK’s Best Workplaces™ by Great Place to Work®.
Press Contact
Funda Cizgenakad
T: +44 7876 616 246
E: Funda@contextworld.com