HDD Shipments Almost Halved in 2022

HDD stock image
(Image credit: Shutterstock)

A new report from Trendfocus shines a light on the carnage in the mechanical storage industry as we start 2023. The Storage Newsletter shared an excerpt from the Trendfocus research work, which spans 2022 and covers the largest HDD storage providers, their shipments, and their market shares. All suffered dramatic declines in shipments over the past year, with Seagate and WDC seeing their shipments almost halve.

According to this data, the worst market performer is the biggest member of the HDD industry triumvirate. Seagate’s HDD shipments dropped as much as 43.7% last year, and WDC was almost as bad, with a 43.0% slide over the same period. However, Toshiba was by no means unscathed by 2022, with the scale of its HDD shipments declining in the same ballpark as its rivals, with shipments falling at as much as 39.3% YoY.

Swipe to scroll horizontally
Table uses Trendfocus report data

Vendor

HDDs in million

Q/Q change

Y/Y change

Market share

Seagate

15.10 – 15.60

-3.9% -0.7%

-43.7% -41.7%

42.9 – 42.9%

Toshiba

7.80 – 8.0

-2.6% -0.1%

-39.3% -37.7%

22.2% – 22.0%

WDC

12.30 – 12.80

-16.2% -12.7%

-43.0% -40.7%

34.9% – 35.2%

TOTAL

35.20 – 36.40

 -8.3% – 5.2%

-42.5 -40.5%

100%

Shipments for the industry also fell as much as 42.5% over the year to approximately 35 or 36 million units. Naturally, the industry can’t take a beating like this for too many years before it becomes unsustainable and HDDs are interned in the graveyard of tech. However, this is largely the result of inventory corrections and a cooling economy. 

In addition to the overall market trends and consideration of the fortunes of each of the big three HDD makers, the market analysts considered three HDD segments separately. Trendfocus reckons the biggest current woe for HDD storage makers is the fall in enterprise cloud storage business demand. A combination of cloud storage firm mergers and inventory corrections meant that this segment “cut nearline shipments to between 10 and 11 million units in CQ4 2022.”

Moving along to 3.5-inch desktop and consumer HDDs, the single-digit percentage drops observed weren’t awful but showed no green shoots of recovery to be grateful for. The 3.5-inch HDD sellers were hoping for a tick-up in the surveillance market and an end to the consumer confidence slump in Q4 2022 – both of which never materialized.

Lastly, 2.5-inch HDDs showed a glimmer of light with a 15% QoQ rebound into Q4. We question whether or not there is always a Q4 rebound due to the holiday gifting season.

We recently reported on half-terabyte HDDs and SSDs hitting price parity. In that report, TrendForce (not to be confused with Trendfocus) delivered some very gloomy news to the laptop HDD industry, saying that 92% of laptops sold in 2022 had SSDs, with the proportion expected to grow to 96% in 2023.

Mark Tyson
News Editor

Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.

  • YouFilthyHippo
    Software Outgrew HDDs well over 10 years ago. SSDs were just too high in price. SSD prices have nose-dived in the last 4 years. Hard drives are impractical this time around, unless it's for data backup, mass storage of movies, music, etc, that sort of stuff. But really, HDDs are becoming a niche thing. They're kind of dead to the masses. HDDs will continue to plummet and in 5 years they will be a specialty item. The same thing happened to 5.25 inch optical bays in ATX cases. It just wasn't practical anymore.
    Reply
  • Alvar "Miles" Udell
    Naturally, the industry can’t take a beating like this for too many years before it becomes unsustainable and HDDs are interned in the graveyard of tech.

    That is still decades from happening, the need for inexpensive bulk storage is only going to continue to grow. What's going to happen is that industry consolidation will occur, probably WD and Toshiba, HDDs will continue to increase in capacity, and the need for so many HDDs will decrease as the reliability of 20TB, and in a few years 30TB,, is shown and multiple lower capacity drives are phased out, so while the shipment volume should continue to decrease, the profit margin per drive should increase.
    Reply
  • DavidLejdar
    Tough. At large capacity, HDDs are still quite cheaper than other storage devices, and still plenty of use cases where the "read speed" is plenty. For me though, I don't use a HDD anymore. I can do with some storage capacity, such as for having "several" modern games installed. But with fibre-optics availability increasing, with which there is a data transfer rata around the same as HDD "read speed", not a point for me to have a HDD, from which transferring 100 GB to the game drive would take some 15 minutes - which is not that much, but with a newer SATA SSD, that would be 3 minutes, or for a number of games the SATA SSD is still plenty good to run a game from directly.

    Shouldn't be too bad for these companies though, as they are selling SSDs too, and the size of software isn't really decreasing.
    Reply
  • USAFRet
    All my house systems are SSD only. Have been for years.

    However, the 85TB in my NAS is all spinners, except for the 480GB SSD systems drive.
    That 85TB is unlikely to change to SSD in the foreseeable future.
    Reply
  • Aaron Priest
    USAFRet said:
    All my house systems are SSD only. Have been for years.

    However, the 85TB in my NAS is all spinners, except for the 480GB SSD systems drive.
    That 85TB is unlikely to change to SSD in the foreseeable future.

    Same here. I'm all SSDs except my Synology NAS boxes for backups. Almost all of my clients are the same now except a few specialized servers still running 15K SAS drives in RAID 6 or 10. Hard drives are still ideal for large NAS backups and won't be changing soon for us, but we don't buy very many drives a year.
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    YouFilthyHippo said:
    Software Outgrew HDDs well over 10 years ago. SSDs were just too high in price. SSD prices have nose-dived in the last 4 years. Hard drives are impractical this time around, unless it's for data backup, mass storage of movies, music, etc, that sort of stuff. But really, HDDs are becoming a niche thing.
    HDDs are becoming "niche" mainly due to 500GB being enough for most people and reaching price parity with HDDs with basically no downsides, not really from software "outgrowing" HDDs. I still run software from HDD. Since I have 32GB of RAM and reboot my PC less than once a month, the "slow load time" is something I see only about once a month and don't give half a damn about. My 10 years old 1TB WD Black still shows perfect health in SMART registers, I have no reason to toss it yet.
    Reply
  • USAFRet
    InvalidError said:
    HDDs are becoming "niche" mainly due to 500GB being enough for most people and reaching price parity with HDDs with basically no downsides,
    Yep.
    Also, laptops. Specifically, thin laptops.
    Reply
  • ThatMouse
    Sounds like PC makers are finally deciding to stop putting HDD's in their laptops and desktops. For the rest of us we still need the 12TB and over for our pirating!
    Reply
  • rluker5
    I picked up a new WD Blue 8TB for $120 a couple months ago for "cold" storage.
    I don't use it for OS or games I'm actively playing, but it holds 8 TB of stuff for way cheaper than a single SSD. I picked up my daughter's WD Blue 12 years ago and it is still fine. If I want faster access to that little used stuff it holds 200MB/s read and I drag the folder over.
    Although you can get 4TB sata SSDs in a pair of 2-2TB for $180 nowadays which is quite a bit cheaper than they used to be. And some newer small pc cases don't have a good spot for 3.5' HDDs.

    A problem with drives in terms of sales is how long they last. I've had one sata2 HDD fail, one 9 year old ROG RAIDR pcie ssd, and a couple 42mm sata SSDs. I just pitched my IDE drives even though they worked fine. Other than tiny things, everything seems to last a very long time. Why replace the slowest (HDD) when you have faster things like SATA SSDs getting dropped down to less used storage because you bought faster stuff?
    Reply
  • Geef
    Guys there is something that is fun and cheap to do with old HDDs. First go buy a Torx screwdriver set. Its only 10 dollars and the T8 size of torx screwdrivers is usually what HDDs use. You can open one up and see what is really inside! The one I opened had one of those super strong magnets inside along with the disks and stuff.

    Doing this also means you can tell people that the drink coaster next to your computer used to hold XXX GB of data!
    Reply