In the first quarter of this year, sales of hard drives fell sharply compared to the previous year. Above all, the sale of nearline storage suffers.

Hard drive sales fell 35 percent in the first quarter of this year. This is evident from figures from TrendFocus. The very sharp decline in near-line storage is particularly striking. Hard drives for storage servers sold 54.3 percent less than in the first quarter last year. Hard drive manufacturers sold just 10.51 million such drives, compared to 18.8 million in the first quarter of 2022.

The decline also occurs in other segments. The PC client market is down 28 percent but surprisingly still accounts for 22.5 million drives shipped. The laptop market has declined 33 percent and accounts for 10 million HDDs. That’s not very surprising. Not only are PC sales declining, hard drives are also becoming increasingly rare.

market share

The world’s hard drives are made by three major manufacturers: Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba. The latest numbers show that Seagete remains the largest with a 44.8 percent market share. Western Digital is in second place with 36.4 percent and Toshiba completes the list with 18.8 percent market share.

Manufacturers expect the market to stabilize in the longer term. Finally, HDDs remain popular for long-term and archival storage. Manufacturers are building higher capacity hard drives year after year, and this higher density is appreciated by server customers. Today, among other things, a surplus of inventories by the sellers plays a trick on the manufacturers. Therefore, the long-term prospects are better.