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PC hard disk shipments are expected to plummet nearly 50 percent in 2019

Update Time: 2019-12-20 11:12:50

Shipments of PC hard drives, which account for 85 per cent of the market, are set to fall sharply this year, according to a new financial report from Nidec, the Japanese manufacturer of spindle motors for hard drives.The motor maker expects hard drive sales to fall about 50 percent in 2019 from a year earlier, and expects sales of other types of hard drives to also slow, but not dramatically.In fact, unit shipments of data center hard drives are expected to increase.

Unit sales of hard drives fell about 43 percent from 2010 to 2018, from about 650 million units in 2010 to 375 million units in 2018, according to data from Japan electric.It looks like sales will continue to fall for years to come.

Nidec recently lowered its HDD drive component shipment forecast to 309 million units in 2019 from 356 million units and to 290 million units in 2020.The recent decline in hard disk shipments has forced Nidec to optimize its hard disk drive motor production capacity.

Shipments of PC hard drives have been hit hardest of all types of storage devices because of the irreversible shift to SSDS in consumer sectors such as desktops and laptops.According to Nidec, shipments of PC hard drives have declined from 289 million in 2013 to 124 million in 2018.This year, however, sales of PC hard drives will continue to fall sharply, from 124 million in 2018 to 65 million in 2019, with a projected drop of as much as 48 percent.

At the same time, shipments of hard disks for a wider range of consumer electronics devices are expected to fall from 77 million in 2018 to 70 million in 2019.This is likely due to a drop in sales of current consoles, monitoring systems and other devices.

However, there is one bright spot in the hard disk market: external hard drives and highly reliable hard drives for data centers look in high demand.Nidec said shipments of the former will remain at about 100 million units, while sales of data center drives are expected to increase to 54 million units.Conversely, as mission-critical applications migrate to SSDS, sales of enterprise hard drives that Nidec computes separately from data center drives are expected to decline slightly.

Among all the changes in hard disk sales, it's worth noting that while the number of drives sold for these industries has fallen slightly or stayed flat, their capacity and average selling price are rising.

Nidec controls the largest share of the HDD spindle motor market, so its predictions are valuable.

Tag: Nidec，hard disk