Today’s hard drives sometimes simply do not fit into the cases of modern thin and light laptops, and 2.5 “SSDs often replace HDD in desktop systems due to higher performance. But consumer hard drives are not about to give up: although sales are falling, they are are still high at almost 139 million units per year, and a new record was set for total capacity in 2020.
According to Trendfocus, hard drive sales for all possible markets were 259.81 million in 2020, down 13.9% from a year earlier. Despite the skyrocketing popularity of SSDs in the consumer PC space, especially among enthusiasts, desktop and laptop hard drives remain the largest HDD category in terms of units sold.
Last year, it shipped 54.46 million desktop hard drives and 84.42 million notebook hard drives. While sales of HDDs for client PCs are declining quantitatively, average capacity is growing faster. Therefore, in Q4 2020, the total volume of all client hard drives delivered to the market set a new record – 266 exabytes.
Last year, Seagate was the undisputed market leader with 42.7% market share, shipping 110.96 million hard drives across all industries. Western Digital came in second with 96 million devices and 37% of the market, while Toshiba came in third with 20.3% of the market and 52.8 million HDDs. Collectively, all hard drives shipped by these three manufacturers in 2020 can store 1,081.32 exabytes of data, more than in 2019 and 2018.
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Since the storage capacity of solid state drives in new PCs is sometimes insufficient, many people buy external storage devices with 2.5 “or 3.5” HDD inside. Such devices are generally classified as consumer electronics (CE) drives and fall into the same category as game console or DVR discs. According to Trendfocus, 49.05 million hard drives were sold for the CE market last year. Unfortunately, the category is not detailed, so it is not clear how much of this number is taken, for example, by various video recording systems.
By the way, the lion’s share of the capacity (62%) falls on 3.5 “HDD for servers and the corporate market. At the same time, last year, three manufacturers shipped 59.22 million 3.5” hard drives to these markets – by 11.8%. more than last year. Meanwhile, the 2.5 “enterprise-grade hard drive market is dying. In 2020, it dropped to 12.66 million units, down 27.9% from 2019.
In general, as you can see, 2020 did not bring any surprises in the hard drive market. The general trend towards a quantitative decline in shipments and an increase in aggregate exabytes began several years ago and continued in 2020. Meanwhile, some existing categories of hard drives – for example, 2.5 “models for PCs, servers and consumer electronics, are showing rapid decline and may in the coming years in a very narrow niche, being supplanted by solid state drives.
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