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Seagate Is the Biggest Hard Drive Vendor

Seagate remains the king of storage devices at the end of 2006

Dec 14, 2006 14:18 GMT  ·  By
  

The word Seagate says it all. I mean I could bother you with a lot of unimportant details regarding the birth of the company and how it got where it is today but that's really not the point. I however will point out several things regarding some of Seagate's actual strong points and perhaps some of its future plans.

First, I have say that Seagate's success is related to reliability. Don't think that its drives are slower than WDC's or that they are louder than Hitachi's. You would be wrong. Seagate drives are actually among the fastest and quietest that exists but as I've said, Seagate is a winner when it comes to how well they perform in time. As a reminder, Seagate was the first hard drive manufacturer to introduce 5-year warranty and as it turned out, that wasn't just a publicity gadget since its drives still hold a higher MTBF than any other products.

Then there's the "looking ahead" part. Along with Hitachi and Toshiba, Seagate was among the first to introduce PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) hard drives. And it seems that they've done pretty well since they still hold the record for the largest capacity hard drive (750GB). PMR has also been adopted by the 2.5" 10,000rpm server drives and by some of Seagate's mobile products.

Talking about pure numbers, it seems that Seagate has shipped 39.1 million HDDs in the 3rd quarter of 2006, up from 33.6 million in the 2nd one. That translates into a 34.3% share of the storage market. Figures also confirm that Seagate has shipped 3.9 million perpendicular hard drives in the same 3rd quarter.

WDC comes in second with 22.7 million units sold in the 3rd quarter (translated into market share that means about 19.9%). The third is Hitachi holding on to a steady 17.5% (19.95 million units). Samsung (11.833million - 10.4%), Toshiba (11.340million 9.9%) and Fujitsu (7.353million 6.4%) end the line with slowly increasing market shares. What is interesting enough about the classification is that Toshiba has sold almost as much as Samsung, although they only produce laptop drives.