While the market for SSDs continues to expand, it's still relative small compared to the HDD market. A report by market research company TrendFocus shows that 26 million SSDs were sold in the third quarter of this year, while in the same period about 118 million HDDs were shipped.
In total 143 exabytes of HDD and SSD capacity shipped in the third quarter on a total of 145 million units. Western Digital and Seagate led the HDD industry, while Samsung, Kingston, and SanDisk topped the SSD market.
After a disappointing second quarter of 2015 for hard disk drives (HDDs), the industry rebounded 7.4% in third quarter this year to 118.59 million units. This increase was due mainly to a sharp rise in consumer electronics HDD sales followed by HDDs for client PCs. Western Digital recorded an overall market share of 43.6%, Seagate holds 39.8%, with Toshiba in the 3rd position with 16.5%.
In the SSD market, unit volumes totaled 26.22 million units in the third quarter, an increase of almost 10% compared to the second quarter of 2015. As with previous quarters, this growth is driven by consumers that buy SSDs to upgrade their computers. Samsung is market leader in consumer SSDs in both units and exabytes shipped.
Enterprise SSDs sales increased with 4.7% compared to the previous quarter totaling 3.1 million units. All three interfaces, SATA, SAS, and PCIe, increased in unit volume from the previous quarter. Enterprise SATA SSDs represented over 80% of the total enterprise market. PCIe SSDs finally topped the 100,000 mark, totaling 117,000 units for the quarter. SAS SSDs grew slightly with just over 450,000 units, a sequential increase of 2.3%. The top three enterprise SSD suppliers for all interface offerings, Samsung, Intel, and HGST, represented a combined total equal to 78% of all enterprise SSD units shipped in the 3rd calendar quarter.
