The big picture: Solid-state drive shipments were mostly flat in the second quarter of 2021 as the component shortage lingers. SSD shipments significantly outpaced those of traditional spinning hard drives, highlighting the importance of performance over sheer capacity. Samsung led the way there with about a quarter of all SSDs sold.
According to data from Trendfocus (via StorageNewsletter), the SSD market as a whole shipped 99.596 million units during the three-month period ending June 30, 2021. For comparison, shipments totaled 99.438 million units in the first quarter.
Collectively, 68.630EB of SSD storage capacity shipped last quarter.
Samsung led the way with 24.4 percent of all shipments followed by Western Digital at 18.8 percent and Kioxia (Toshiba) with 12.6 percent.
Breaking it down further, we see that client SSDs were responsible for the majority of shipments with 86.86 million units. A full 5.79 million enterprise SATA drives shipped during the quarter as well, alongside 1.1 million SAS SSDs and 5.84 million enterprise PCIe drives.
Client SSD shipments correlate with PC shipment data recently shared by IDC, which noted that 83.614 million PCs shipped during the second quarter. Lenovo, HP and Dell led the way, in that order, with shipments of 20.005 million, 18.594 million and 13.976 million PCs, respectively.
In its hard drive report last week, Trendfocus revealed that 67.37 million units had shipped in the second quarter. That's not nearly as many individual drives when compared to SSDs, but HDDs far outweigh SSDs in terms of sheer storage capacity at 349.52 exabytes.
Image credit Marc Pezin