Western Digital outships Seagate in 2010

Matthew DeCarlo

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Western Digital stripped Seagate of its leading spot in the hard drive market during the first quarter of 2010 and the company maintained that lead throughout the year. According to Information Network, total hard drive shipments grew 17.1% to 653.5 million in 2010 and Western Digital represented 31.4% of the market, nearly two percentage points ahead of Seagate's share of 29.6%. Hitachi took third place in overall shipments with 16.4%, ahead of Toshiba/Fujitsu at 12.6% and Samsung at 9.2%.


Western Digital reportedly earned its number one title by focusing on the rapidly expanding mobile sector, whereas Seagate catered more to desktop and enterprise customers. The mobile computer market grew by 29% in 2010 -- more than triple the desktop sector's 8% increase. Western Digital accounted for 27.5% of mobile drive shipments, followed by Hitachi at 26% and Seagate at 20.4%. With the emergence of tablet PCs, 2011 should prove to be another fruitful year for the mobile storage market.

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I can't help but believe that Seagate's woes with their SATA 11 series still haunts the landscape.
 
About time, I say. In my experience, Western Digital HDDs have been much more reliable than Seagates for a good while. Since Seagate hit the 1TB margin, their build quality has been a little borked.
 
Had a bad experience with an external WD drive dying extremely prematurely. Other than that, I happily buy from them. :)
 
Where I work we see heaps of faulty WD Green and Blue drives, I have only had one die on me so far, I prefer seagate personally "for backup purposes anyway", thankfully my two VelociRaptors are still running sweet.
 
cyrusjumpjet said:
Had a bad experience with an external WD drive dying extremely prematurely. Other than that, I happily buy from them. :)

I love WD, but refuse to buy any of their external drives. Reason being is they use greens in most of them. I bought one of their more expensive externals and it failed on me after a month. Sure enough it was still a green when I opened it. I refuse to buy greens its got to be blue or better for me.
 
bl4cksh4d0w said:
cyrusjumpjet said:
Had a bad experience with an external WD drive dying extremely prematurely. Other than that, I happily buy from them. :)

I love WD, but refuse to buy any of their external drives. Reason being is they use greens in most of them. I bought one of their more expensive externals and it failed on me after a month. Sure enough it was still a green when I opened it. I refuse to buy greens its got to be blue or better for me.

But you have to remember that it is going through USB2.0 which is incredibly slow compared to the speed that the greens can tranfer data. and they require little power therefore means it can be powered by USB as well.
 
I got burned by Seagate's firmware disaster when I built my pc. This is likely why they fell to second place. The Seagate drive is humming along now, tho. They explicitly told me NOT to upgrade the firmware, but I did and it solved the problem. Now 2 years later I tried to replace it with a Western Digital of higher capacity, but ran in to all sorts of problems. First of all, Acronis doesn't duplicate linux partitions, of which I have one. I then used a piece of Paragon's backup software, which also wasn't smart enough to completely clone all partitons without giving error messages. Secondly, the new Western Digital drive was of the "green" type, and the performance of it is disgusting compared to the non-green Seagate drive. Finally, the Western Digital drive was DOA and had to be RMAed for a new one. That took a month of waiting. I seem to be unlucky with hard drives, altho I have never lost any data to them. I guess the luck is in the right place. I gave up on outright replacing the Seagate drive and it will run along with the Western Digital as a second drive. I want to install Ubuntu linux in addition to the Slackware linux I now have. I like to use linux for Facebook and AOL, which has all sorts of viruses. Linux is good for forbidden web sites also. No scanning either. My winter project, altho spring is just around the corner. Eventually I will move to South America where they don't have winter.
 
I had a bad RMA experience with Seagate drives a while back which led me to switch to IBM then eventually WD hard drives. I' currently using a WD Caviar Black HD although I still have an 5-year old Maxtor HD in my other PC. I've read about the high failure rate of Caviar Green HDs in other forums although I have no personal experience with those models.
 
Been happily married to both Seagate and WD for years...Never had a bad bone with any of them.

I wish i had the same luck with DVD drives :(
 
Never bought anything but WD and have always been reliable. Sure like anything there could be a bad one but I see all these other manufactures having much more issues. Why even risk it? I'm surprised anyone is even close to WD....I cring when I see another manufactures hard drive in someones computer.
 
I have had a WD Black 640gb for going on two years now and a 320 blue (previously windows drive) and both work perfectly. I think Seagate passed them up because lots of OEM's use Seagate drives in their systems. I prefer and always recommend Western Digital Blue/Black series and Samsung drives. And will always use those brands.
 
My ancient eMachines T-5026 came with a WD 160 GB "Caviar Blue" (SATA 150Gbs) and it's still going strong after 6 years! Can't complain about that. Compared to anything I have that's newer, this drive is really noisy. That doesn't seem to affect its performance though.

I have one 640 GB Seagate 7200.11 that works fine. It seems all the 7200.11s weren't affected by the "bricking bug". I plugged in the serial # to Seagate's website. They said I didn't need to do anything, I didn't, the drive works fine.

I think Seagate drives may be quieter than WDs, but I only use the smaller units ( =< 320 GBs) as OS drives. For storage I use WD Caviar Blacks exclusively @ 640, 750, and 1TB. I guess I bought into the dual processor, huge cache hype.

As far as shipping percentages go, shouldn't Toshiba and Samsung be considered one entity? I mean "TSST" is their compound corporate identity, is it not?
 
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