Market research: HDD shipments fell 40 percent last quarter

Hard drive shipments fell about 40 percent in the fourth quarter of 2022 from a year earlier. This is the conclusion of research by Trendfocus, a research company that focuses on the storage sector.

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

According to Trendfocus, the largest decline was seen in the enterprise segment. Large cloud companies would have purchased significantly fewer HDDs in the last quarter of 2022. In other markets, inventory corrections are taking place, which has also caused other suppliers to buy fewer enterprise HDDs. Shipments of 3.5″ consumer HDDs also fell slightly, although 2.5″ shipments were up slightly from a quarter earlier.

Trendfocus previously published figures for the first three quarters from 2022. When these figures are added together, it turns out that in all of 2022, approximately 176.70 million hard drives would have been shipped by Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba. In 2021 that number was still at 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 already overtook those of HDDs; in 2020 more SSDs than HDDs would have been delivered for the first time, also writes ComputerBase based on previous Trendfocus figures.