For almost a year now, sales of personal storage hard drives and entry-level drives have seen a significant decline. With a drop of more than 13%, the last quarter was the toughest for manufacturers.
In 2013 worldwide shipments of storage systems and entry-level drives ( still up 13.6% ) had failed to hold in 2014. Since early 2015 we have seen a clear decline in the figures, indeed after losing 6.4% in the first quarter, then 2.7% in the second, the number of drives sold dropped to 16.7 million between July and September, 13.4% less than the same period the previous year.
It is this drop in volume that caused the hard drive sector’s revenue to fall by 19.8% to $1.3 Bn during these few months. According to lDC, the difficulties encountered stem from competition, in particular from hosting providers offering online storage plans that are ever more secure, ever larger and ever cheaper. Companies are increasingly interested in these services which provide access to data from anywhere, at any time, but this is also a space saving ( no server room ) and a clear cost saving.