Hard Drive shipments fell by 17% in 2015
Ever since Solid State Drives started making in-roads in enterprise and notebook segments, there is a steady decline in Hard Drive sales. Yes, the average storage of HDDs is increasing every quarter but at the same time, the price per GB is also falling. Anandtech has revealed shipment numbers from 2015 year and it does not look good for HDD makers, especially Seagate and Western Digital. The good news is that external hard drive sales is on the rise as more and more users are opting for SSD internal hard drive and storing unused data on external hard drives. Average selling price was 59$ for Western Digital and 60$ for Seagate.
In the year 2015, 468.9 million units were shipped and this is a huge drop from the year 2010 when 651 million units were shipped. The year 2014 saw 564.1 million units shipped. As expected Western Digital took the #1 spot and Seagate came in close second. In 4Q2015, 115 million units were shipped. in 4Q2014, 141 million units were shipped and in same quarter in 2011, 177 million units were shipped.
Coming to storage space, Western Digital has managed to ship 69.1 exabytes (69,100,000 gigabytes) while Seagate managed to ship 606 exabytes of storage. WD’s increase from 63.5 exabytes in previous quarter while Seagate’s was 55.2 exabytes in previous quarter. Average capacity per drive increased to 1390GB per drive (up from 1228 GB in previous quarter and 1088GB in final quarter of 2014) for Western Digital and 1320GB per drive for Seagate (1172 GB per drive in 3Q2015 and 1069 in 4Q2014).
The surprise here is that Toshiba managed to increase their sharee from 15.93% to 16.95%. Western Digital’s share is now at 43.17% (down from 43.91), Seagate’s share is 39.88% (down from 40.15%).
Coming to consumer market, the decline is steeper. Only 28.9 million drives were shipped for notebooks in 4Q2015 and this is down from 40.9 million units shipped in 4Q2014 (and 32.2 million in 3Q2015). Western Digital managed to ship 15.3 million HDDs (down from 15.8 past quarter and 21.2 in 4Q2014), Seagate managed to ship 13.6 million HDDs (down from 16.4 past quarter and 19.7 in 4Q2014).
Desktop HDD shipment also took a big hit. There were 24.2 million units shipped for desktops (3.5″ form factor) and is down from 31.4 million units shipped in 4Q2014 (24.1 million in 3Q2015). WD managed to ship 12.5 million units (down from 11.7 past quarter and 15.4 in 4Q2014) and Seagate managed to ship 11.7 million units (down from 12.4 past quarter and 16 in 4Q2014).
Coming to External HDDs, Western Digital managed to ship 6.4 million units (up from 5.6 past quarter and down from 7.2 in 4Q2014) and Seagate managed to ship 6.3 million units (up from 5.2 million past quarter and 6.1 million in 4Q2014).
Hit the source link below for highly detailed analysis of how the hard drive industry is right now.
