The HDD market has been gradually losing sales volume in recent years, as a result of the migration of many industries to solid-state storage. But, in turn, customers of this type of disk are betting on high-capacity models, which provide affordable solutions for storing large volumes of information. This leaves most of the market in the hands of enterprise customers and data centers, with the nearline category the main driver of sales.
During the first two years of the pandemic, sales have fluctuated, but in general, the large cloud clients have brought important dividends to the industry, and with the restoration of normality, companies have resumed spending on IT. But with the move to 2022 the market has been winding down and according to preliminary figures published by Trendfocus, HDD shipments have fallen between 31% and 35% year-on-year in the second quarter of the year, remaining at around 45 million units. units.
In the 3.5” and 2.5” enterprise HDD segment, OEMs have carried over inventory from the previous quarter and there has been a slight contraction in demand, which has added to some supply chain difficulties. components for certain products. The result is that shipments of this type of disc have decreased slightly, remaining at regarding 2.5 million units in these three months. For its part, the demand for nearline units has remained more or less stable, with regarding 19 million units shipped.
The consumer electronics hard drive segment and 3.5” desktop drives (including external drives) have shown a 30% sequential drop, dropping sharply to regarding 13 million drives. This covers both video surveillance HDDs and PC and retail HDDs. Meanwhile, in the same category, but with a 2.5” format, there has been the largest quarter-on-quarter drop, estimated at 40%, remaining at regarding 11 million units. And the segment of 2.5” HDD drives for consumer electronics continues the sharp decline that has been occurring in recent times, which responds to the change to SSD drives.
