Hard disk shipments fell about 40 percent in the fourth quarter of 2022 compared to the previous year. This is the conclusion of research conducted by Trendfocus, a research firm focused on the storage sector.

directional focus This week it published its preliminary numbers for the hard drive market in the fourth quarter of 2022, He also writes Storage Newsletter. It shows that Seagate delivered hard disk drives (HDDs) 41.7 to 43.7 percent fewer than in the same period in 2021. Western Digital shipments were down as much as 43.0 percent, while Toshiba shrank to 39.3 percent. In total, 35.2 to 36.4 million hard drives were shipped last quarter. This is a maximum decrease of 42.5 percent compared to the previous year.

According to Trendfocus, the largest decline was observed in the enterprise sector. Large cloud companies had purchased fewer hard drives in the fourth quarter of 2022. In other markets, inventory corrections are being made, which has also caused other vendors to buy fewer enterprise hard drives. Shipments of 3.5-inch consumer hard drives were also down slightly, although 2.5-inch shipments were up slightly from the prior quarter.

Trendfocus previously published numbers for the first Three-quarters From 2022. When these numbers are added together, it turns out that in all of 2022, 176.70 million hard drives could have been shipped by Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba. in 2021 That number was still at 258.98 millionabout 46 percent more than this year.

Hard drive sales have been declining for years as SSDs have become more popular. SSD shipments have already surpassed those of hard drives; In 2020, it was possible to deliver more SSDs than HDDs for the first time, As ComputerBase writes Based on previous Trendfocus numbers.