Survey observes SSDs are getting more popular

A new report into drives - both hard disks and SSDs (and indeed USB drives) - has been published.

The survey from EaseUS (which makes backup solutions) provides some illuminating statistics, encompassing a wide swathe of 208,000 PC owners and over 750,000 drives (with the survey running over the past three months).

The precise number of drives included was 754,142, of which 346,477 were SSDs, 200,818 were HDDs, and 206,847 were USB drives.

That means SSDs made up 45.9% of all the drives, compared to 26.6% for hard drives (and 27.4% for USB drives), showing that solid-state drives are by far the most popular choice these days, as you'd expect.

EaseUS notes:

"The number of SSD users continuously increases, surpassing the number of HDD and USB drive users."

What are the most popular brands for SSDs? Kingston is top, followed by Samsung, and then Crucial in third place.

Kingston's top models are the SA400S37240G and SA400S37480G, whereas Samsung's lead performers are the Samsung 980 Pro 1TB, 860 Evo 500GB, 970 Evo Plus 1TB, and 980 Pro 2TB. Crucial's bestseller is the CT500MX500SSD1 according to the survey data.

As to capacity, EaseUS observes that smaller SSDs are more commonplace, and that over half of SSDs were in the size range from 128GB to 512GB.

We can likely expect that to change going forward, of course, as bigger drives are becoming cheaper - at least for now.

If we look at the hard drive side of the equation, the most-used sizes are predictably larger, and fall in the 512GB to 1TB range.

When it comes to the most popular hard disks out there, Seagate is top of the table, followed by Toshiba, and then WD (Western Digital).

Most of the drives out there are still using the SATA interface - 36.6% of them to be precise. NVMe represents 17.6% of all the drives out there.