SSD becoming the norm in laptops

The laptop market has been a challenging place for the past couple of years, with users shifting towards ultra-thin and touchscreen models.

The Windows 7 end-of-support deadline has come and gone, and the window for the channel to prise ageing technology out of their customers’ hands looks to be passing over the horizon.

However, there could well be a conversation for resellers to have with users around the way that hardware is changing, specifically on the storage front.

Research from Context, analysing the speed of adoption of solid-state drives (SSD), has led market watchers to forecast that by the end of this year, no new laptop sold across Western Europe will have a hard disk drive (HDD) as its primary storage.

The slowdown in HDD products has already started, with the fourth quarter of 2019 seeing a 9.4% drop in products sold through IT distribution.

Context found that 93.3% of new laptops sold in the quarter had SSDs as their primary storage, a significant increase from the 66.7% at the end of 2017. The interest in the storage technology has also extended to desktops, with the level of new devices sold with SSD increasing to 82% at the end of 2019.

The Nordics and the Netherlands are the fastest markets to embrace SSD, but the UK is not far behind, and the trend is something that hardware resellers need to be aware of as the bells starts to toll louder for the old HDD.

“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,” he added.

“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.”

Those trends have given Context the confidence to predict that no new laptop will be sold without an SDD by the end of this year, and the same will be true of desktop PCS in 2021.

The increasing popularity of Chromebooks has highlighted the success of devices that rely on cloud storage and given the channel evidence to disarm those that might be skeptical about moving away from the trusty hard disk drive.