The world’s largest laptop vendors seem to have stopped selling laptops with hard disk drives anymore, at least in the US.
TechRadar Pro research on more than 100 laptop models on Dell.com, Lenovo.com and HP.com, case rationalization, lack of demand for laptops with hard drives and falling component prices (eMMC and SSD) showed that the HDD was completely removed from the product groups due to
Hard disk drives followed optical drives (CD/DVD) and floppy disk drives in the path of obsolescence of storage methods. As a whole, 2.5-inch HDDs could disappear entirely as the average price per storage of solid-state drives continues its downward trend. Hard drives, which usually come in a larger, more common form factor (3.5-inch), continue to exist in desktop computers.
Laptop HDDs seem to have lost the battle with SSD as they are much slower, more fragile, larger and consume more power. Although their low price and high capacity are their biggest advantages, high capacity is quickly no longer a problem as the number of cloud storage providers increases and their fees decrease. That’s why we see that the laptop is offered with much lower capacity options such as 64GB and 128GB SSD, especially in the cheaper part of the market. By comparison, the lowest capacity 2.5-inch HDD exceeds 500GB.
We can say that the next step in the cascade is eMMC, which can be defined as an embedded memory storage that is popular among entry-level, super cheap devices such as Microsoft Surface Laptop Go, and is usually found in smartphones. It is often recommended to avoid laptops with this storage technology, as it is often much slower and comes in smaller capacities.
It’s not the end of the road for hard disk drives, though. Especially with very high capacities (4 TB – 20 TB), external HDDs still have a very important place as storage space. And with 30 TB options in the production line, they are still seen as indispensable options, especially for data centers.
Of course, it’s important to note that the results of this research only apply to consumer laptops and not all manufacturers…
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