Seagate to Control 40-Percent of HDD Market

By Douglas Perry
published

The market research firm estimates that about 652.4 million hard drives were shipped last year. Seagate shipped about 195.2 million units and Samsung about 66.0 million. Seagate will not be able to close the gap to WD right now, as its rival recently acquired Hitachi Global Storage and shipped 203.7 million and 115.8 million units, which resulted in a 50% market share.

The only other player left in the market is Toshiba/Fujitsu, which shipped 71.7 million units and hit slightly more than 10% market share.

"Overall, the reduction from five to three manufacturers considerably improves the stability and efficiency of the HDD industry," said Fang Zhang, analyst for storage systems at IHS. "However, the acquisition also signals a recognition by Seagate and Samsung that conditions in the storage space will become more challenging in the future." The $1.38 billion acquisition of Samsung's HDD unit is widely believed to give Seagate access to Samsung's clients in the Asian market.

"Taken together, the mergers engineered by Seagate and Western Digital will be key to improving the sustainability of the HDD industry, IHS believes, demonstrating the industry's nimble response to fast-occurring

changes playing out in the storage environment," said Ryan Chien, researcher for memory and storage at IHS.

Douglas Perry
28 Comments Comment from the forums
  • nforce4max
    Interesting how "IHS' tends to turn up so often yet stand for different terms and groups ect. Every thing from satanic cathloc jesuits to hardware lol. Integrated Heat Spreader is one hardware term o.O
    Reply
  • nforce4max
    otacon72Less competition is never a good thing when it comes to electronics of any type.
    I dread when this happens to the SSD market :(
    Reply
  • This has Firmly pushed me into a corner,, way to many seagate and samsung failures, the only drives I have not seen fail in the last 4 years is Hitachi, and Ive had a few WD drives fail, but more Samsungs failed in period than all other failures put together!

    I will never buy another samsung product!
    Reply
  • I'm afraid I must disagree. There is a balance between too little competition and too much. If you have too little, one or two companies control the entire market and have no incentive to lower prices or innovate.

    But when you have tons of companies fighting for a slice of the same small pie, corners are cut and quality drops. And how do you recover from this situation? High quality items require investing money to design and manufacture, and then they either need to sell in massive quantities, or they need to be priced very high to remain profitable. If the market is already flooded by millions of cheap devices, it's very difficult to justify an expensive one, no matter how much better built it may be. There are many times when I have found it difficult to find a high quality example of an every day item in the sea of generic chinese knockoffs.

    I'm not saying that the hard drive market is at that point right now, but I have no doubt that SSDs will replace a great deal of the mechanical hard drive market in the future. So while I'm not particularly happy with this merge, I recognize that it probably makes good sense to consolidate in the face of a shrinking market. There's less money wasted on re-inventing the wheel and less need to cut corners to remain in the market. In exchange for hard drive prices levelling out somewhat (and they're currently DAMN good, if you ask me,) we might see the quality climb. And that's okay by me.
    Reply
  • dco
    wow I didn't realise the HDD market was that small, i guess the only positives is that HDD are extremely cheap and at least the emerging SDD market has more competition.
    Reply
  • jimmysmitty
    moriconThis has Firmly pushed me into a corner,, way to many seagate and samsung failures, the only drives I have not seen fail in the last 4 years is Hitachi, and Ive had a few WD drives fail, but more Samsungs failed in period than all other failures put together!I will never buy another samsung product!
    I actually get a few Hitatchi. I get a lot of WD and some Seagate at work, but my personal experience is great with Seagate, ok with WD never messed with the rest. Have 2 Seagate Barracudda 7200 120GBs that are about 8 years old and still kicking.
    Reply
  • makwy2
    When there are too few chances for competition things stagnate, I hope this doesn't happen to the HDD market.
    Reply
  • fir_ser
    This is a good thing for the industry, and I hope it will be as good for the consumers, but I highly doubt it.
    Reply
  • Ragnar-Kon
    jimmysmittyI actually get a few Hitatchi. I get a lot of WD and some Seagate at work, but my personal experience is great with Seagate, ok with WD never messed with the rest. Have 2 Seagate Barracudda 7200 120GBs that are about 8 years old and still kicking.I personally have never had a Western Digital, Seagate, or Hitatchi fail fail of me. I have had a few Maxtor drives fail on me, however.
    Now if your talking SAS/SCSI, Western Digital has been the king of failures for me, but I've never had a Maxtor, IBM, or Cisco drive fail.

    So... my experiences combined with other people's experiences I've heard about have lead me to believe that it is just luck of the draw.
    Reply
  • verbalizer
    I am a firm believer in Seagate HDD's and have been for years.
    I have no issues with them and 40% of the market at all..
    A Segate Barracuda and/or a WD VelociRaptor / Raptor is what I run in my ALL my units..
    Reply