Dark Future for 2.5-inch HDDs

HDDs are today offered in two form factors: 2.5 inches and 3.5 inches, following the death of all the other ones.

No more 2.5-inch announcements
There was no internal 2.5-inch HDD announced at all since March 2018 by WD (a notebook HDD), since December 2017 by Toshiba and since May 2017 by Seagate (enterprise 10,000rpm devices). Per comparison 19 were released in year 2010 only. For 2.5-inch hybrid units integrating flash memories and disappearing, the last one was launched by WD in 2013.

Capacity stabilizing
Are the manufacturers unable to increase the capacity of their 2.5-inch HDDs or don’t they want to invest anymore in this form factor? You could imagine they could apply helium technology to 2.5-inch devices like they did on 3.5-ich units but it was not the case to add more platters, even if the their height (7mm an 9.5mm) is limiting the number of disks to be used.
 
Plans have been revealed for the use of HAMR or MAMR for 3.5-inch and not 2.5-inch drives.

The future for 2.5-inch HDDs is dark but, for a while, not for external units continuing to be released as they are a cheapest solution than SSDs for backup. Here the market is also oriented to game console and surveillance.

2.5 inch enterprise HDDs will die and they will stop to be manufactured progressively by all the three HDD makers.

For notebooks, SSDs are more and more adopted rather than HDDs even if they are more expansive because end users are ready to pay more for much better specs and the price gap between the two technologies is and will continue to diminish.

Here are some statistics confirming this trend
Western Digital shipped 21.2 million notebook drives in 2FQ15, a figure declining regularly to reach only 9.6 million in 4FQ18. For the same periods, enterprise devices were down from 8.0 million to 6.6 million and global units sold diminish from 61 million to 34 million.

For Trendfocus, WW mobile HDD units were down from 35 million in 3CQ18 to 31 million in 3CQ19. Performance enterprise devices decreased from 5.3 million in 3CQ18 to 4.7 million in 3CQ19. The market of 3.5-inch external drives will also diminish.

At the end, in the shrinking HDD market, 3.5-inch high-capacity HDDs will be tomorrow the only viable sector for rotating magnetic drives.