The second quarter of 2021 saw SSDs sell nearly 100 million units across the globe as per data from TrendForce. Hard drives had their hurrah with an overall larger capacity of 351 EB sold, but SSDs were much more popular among consumers and data centers. Sales figures put SSD shipments at 99.6 million, far more than HDD shipments which remained under the 68 million figure. In terms of storage, high-capacity HDDs were more popular than their NAND counterpart, with an overall capacity of 351 EB compared to just 68 EB on the SSD side.
Seagate was the most popular HDD vendor with a share of nearly 42% of the overall market, followed closely by WD with 37% and Toshiba with 21%.
According to statistics, M.2 SSD was the leading standard in the consumer market, widely used in notebook computers and next-generation game consoles. However, in terms of average capacity, NVMe SSDs were more popular with an average capacity of 512GB.
In the SSD market, Samsung took first place with a share of 24.4%, followed by Western Digital, Kioxia, SK Hynix, Micron, and Kingston. WD is the only direct competitor to the South Korean NAND vendor with a share of ~19%, although SK Hynix (with a share of ~17%) may become a potential threat as well.
