A study by Trendfocus in 2022 covering the largest hard drive vendors recorded a shrinking of the industry. All manufacturers have experienced sharp declines in shipments over the past year, with Seagate and WDC nearly halving their shipments.
According to the data, Seagate’s hard drive shipments fell 43.7% last year, and WDC sales were almost as bad, with a 43% decline over the same period. At the start of 2022, Toshiba was relatively unscathed, with its hard drive shipments declining in line with its competitors, with shipments down 39.3% year-on-year. In general, supplies in the industry fell by 42.5%, to 35.2-36.4 million units.
In addition to looking at overall market trends and the state of each of the top three hard drive manufacturers, market analysts looked at the three hard drive segments separately. Trendfocus believes that the biggest challenge for hard drive manufacturers is the drop in demand for enterprise cloud storage. This segment reduced shipments to 10-11 million units in the fourth quarter of 2022.
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The decline in the segment of 3.5-inch consumer hard drives was not radical, but there was no visible trend of recovery. 3.5” HDD vendors were hoping for the growth of the video surveillance market and the end of the decline in consumption in the fourth quarter of 2022, but none of this has happened.
Finally, 2.5-inch hard drives showed growth of 15% in the fourth quarter. Such a rebound can be attributed to the season of Christmas gifts.
Also recently, price parity was achieved for hard drives and solid-state drives with a capacity of 512 GB. That’s according to a TrendForce (not Trendfocus) report three weeks ago, which said, among other things, that 92% of laptops sold in 2022 had solid-state drives – a share expected to rise to 96% in 2023.
Is a hard drive enough in 2022? Comparison of SATA HDD vs NVMe SSD in games and synthetics
Source: Tom’s Hardware
