WD Won Leadership of HDD Market in 2010, Overtook Seagate

For the hard disk drive market, the year 2010 was a period of growth, and while both Seagate and Western Digital performed admirably, marketing-wise, it seems that a change in leadership came to pass.

For many years, Seagate and Western Digital have been battling over the top position on the hard disk drive market.

Granted, the competition was a bit one-sided, so to speak, considering that the former actually held the top spot for years.

Still, it would appear that the latter finally succeeded in overcoming its rival during 2010, despite the various accomplishments Seagate mentioned.

Among other things, Seagate said it had sold over 1 million self-encrypting HDDs in total, although less fortuitous things happened as well.

To be more precise, the outfit tried to become a private companies, meaning that it set itself up for sale.

Rumors even said, at one point, that Western Digital was thinking of being the buyer, something that would have led to the creation of a massive worldwide HDD giant. Seagate refused though.

Either way, a recent report published by Digitimes says that, in the midst of an overall increase in HDD shipments, WD managed to become leading supplier.

To be more specific, about 653.5 million HDDs were shipped during the year 2010, corresponding to a rise of 17.1% over 2009. WD supplied 31.4% of them, while Seagate had 29.6% .

The HDDs for laptops got a special mention, as WD led the mobile HDD market with a share of 27.5%, followed by Hitachi (26%) and Seagate (20.4%).

This is interesting, considering that the mobile PC market grew by a percentage of 29 while desktops only jumped 8%.

Of course, knowing that tablets will impact sales of notebooks, and that they don't use HDDs, it is a given that hard disk drives may, in fact, start to experience a slowdown in terms of overall shipments.