Market research: HDD deliveries fell by 40 percent last quarter

Hard drive deliveries fell by approximately 40 percent in the fourth quarter of 2022 compared to a year earlier. This is evident from research by Trendfocus, a research company that focuses on the storage sector.

Trend focus published its preliminary figures for the HDD market in the fourth quarter of 2022 this week, also writes Storage Newsletter. It shows that Seagate supplied 41.7 to 43.7 percent fewer HDDs than in the same period in 2021. Western Digital’s deliveries are said to have fallen by up to 43.0 percent, while Toshiba’s have shrunk to 39.3 percent. A total of 35.2 to 36.4 million hard drives were delivered last quarter. This amounts to a decrease of up to 42.5 percent compared to a year earlier.

According to Trendfocus, the largest decline was seen in the enterprise segment. Large cloud companies are said to have purchased significantly fewer HDDs in the last quarter of 2022. Inventory corrections are taking place in other markets, which also caused other suppliers to purchase fewer enterprise HDDs. Deliveries of 3.5″ consumer HDDs also fell slightly, although 2.5″ deliveries actually increased slightly from a quarter earlier.

Trendfocus previously published figures for the first three quarters from 2022. When these figures are added together, it appears that approximately 176.70 million hard drives would have been delivered by Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba in 2022. In 2021 that number was still 258.98 millionabout 46 percent more than this year.

HDD sales have been declining for years as SSDs become more and more popular. SSD deliveries previously overtook those of HDDs; in 2020, more SSDs than HDDs will be delivered for the first time, also writes ComputerBase based on previous Trendfocus figures.