Western Digital Prepped to Surpass Seagate HD Shipments in 2010

For the past couple of years, Seagate, thanks in part to its success in the desktop PC market, has held its ground well ahead of Western Digital. If trends seen over the past year continue into 2010, though, it will soon be WD well ahead of Seagate, and the reason is just the opposite… WD does well in the mobile market, which continues to grow at a rapid rate.

In Q1 of last year, Seagate shipped 38.4 million hard drives, while WD fell quite far behind with 31.6 million (admittedly it’s hard to consider this “far behind”), but things changed dramatically in Q2, where Seagate shipped 40.6 million and Western Digital 40.0 million. During both Q3 and Q4, Seagate managed to keep ahead, but in Q4, it was by a mere 0.4 million.

During Q1, Seagate probably got a little bit of a wake-up call, when WD for the first time in recent memory exceeded its sales by 0.8 million units. Given that Seagate holds a good share of the desktop market, and WD the mobile market, it seems likely that the latter stands to gain some serious overall market-share during the remainder of 2010, especially as desktops are declining in popularity and the vice versa is happening to mobiles.

Regardless of whether or not WD comes ahead, the market as a whole is growing at a rapid pace. This includes more than only mechanical storage of course, as solid-state disks continue to decrease in price over time and make way for increased adoption. Neither Seagate or Western Digital have SSDs to thank for increased sales up to this point, but that’s something that could change in the years ahead, and it’s clear both companies are taking SSDs much more seriously. Mechanical HDDs have a long, long life ahead of them, but it’s hard to ignore the enormous success of the SSD over just the past year alone.

Western Digital (WD) came close to taking the lead in the global hard disk drive (HDD) market in 2009, but a surge in desktop sales kept Seagate in the lead for the year, according to The Information Network. However, WD moved past Seagate in the first quarter of 2010, shipping 51.1 million units compared to 50.3 million for Seagate, said the research firm. WD may take the lead in the 2010 HDD market.