WASHINGTON: Today we’re launching a new feature on the AnandTech Pipeline: Quarterly HDD shipments reports. Here we’ll examine HDD sales and analyze what’s behind them. Since some numbers are estimates, we recommend you to check our counting methodology in the end of the story before reading.
While no one is writing off the PC market entirely, since it’s heyday nearly a decade ago the PC market has been in a slow decline for some time, and that decline has yet to bottom out. Sales of personal computers declined by roughly 25 – 30 million units year-over-year, hitting an eight-year low in 2015 due to economic trends, weak international currencies, and competition from tablets and smartphones in some markets.
Shipments of PC components naturally dropped alongside weak PC sales, but hard drive sales in particular have made for an interesitng observation: for 2015, declines of HDD sales greatly outpaced the regress of the PC market. Based on estimates from Western Digital and Seagate (see counting methodology below), the total available market of hard drives contracted by nearly 100 million units year-over-year in 2015.
