Dell, Lenovo and HP are killing laptops with hard drives, marking the end of an era

The world’s biggest laptop sellers are no longer selling laptop with HDDsat least in the United States.

Research conducted by Tech Radar Pro on Dell.com, Lenovo.com and HP.com on more than 100 laptop models revealed that hard drives have been eliminated from product lines entirely due to a combination of chassis rationalization, lack of demand for laptops with hard drives and lower component prices (eMMC and SSD).

Hard drives have followed optical drives (CD/DVD) and floppy disk drives on the path to storage obsolescence. Overall, the 2.5-inch form factor is expected to be significantly, if not entirely, reduced in laptops by the end of the year as the average price per storage of SSDs continues its trend on the decline. Hard drives are still found in desktop computers where they often come in a larger and more common form factor (3.5 inches) where they don’t carry the same stigma as their portable counterparts.

Farewell the click of death

Laptop hard drives have lost out to SSDs because they are much slower, more fragile, larger, and consume more power. Their low price and high capacity were their saving grace, but with so many cloud storage providers, high capacity quickly became an issue, which is why so many laptops come with 64GB and 128GB SSDs. Go, especially at the lower end of the market. The lowest capacity 2.5-inch hard drive, by comparison, is over 500 GB.

Next on the rung is eMMC, an integrated memory storage popular among entry-level and super-cheap devices like the Microsoft Surface Go Laptop and commonly found in smartphones. It tends to be much slower and available in smaller capacities, so we generally recommend avoiding laptops with this storage technology.

This isn’t the end of the road for hard drives; they are always very useful as external hard drive storage where they still offer the best value for money, especially at very high capacities (4TB to 20TB). And with 30 TB hard drives in the pipeline there is still a lot going on for them, especially in data centers.

Note that the search results only apply to consumer laptops. One Dell business laptop – the Vostro 14 3400 – comes with a 1TB hard drive. The search did not extend to other smaller vendors like Acer, Asus, MSI, Gateway, etc.