Hard Disk Drive Shipments Projected to Drop by 50% in 2019

Market Projection from Japanese Company Nidec

Nidec is a Japanese company that makes 85% of the motors inside hard disk drives. As such, their market analysis and projections are important in the industry.

According to Nidec’s latest financial presentation however, hard disk drive shipments will drastically drop this year. This is due to a variety of factors not entirely attributed to simply less sales.

While the obvious rise of SSDs displaced HDD use in laptops, the availability of larger capacity drives also factor in to the amount of drives shipping year-to-year.

Furthermore, although Nidec expects HDD shipment to slow down in some markets like desktop drives, it expects to ship higher volumes for data centers this year.

How Much Hard Disk Drives are Expected to Ship in 2019?

Nidec recently revised their HDD shipment forecast from 356 million drives to 309 million drives in 2019. The expect this number to drop even further down to only 290 million units in 2020.

The PC market represents the largest drop year-over-year, with 289 million in 2013 and only 65 million in 2019. It is going to further decrease down to just 46 million in 2020 according to Nidec’s numbers. Meanwhile, external drives have for the most part remained stable since 2015.

Inversely, Data Center will continue to be the only growth segment in the HDD market. Increasing from 54 million this year to 60 million in 2020.