What just happened? Covid-19 is having a detrimental effect on several industries, including many segments of the tech sector. One of these is the hard disk drive (HDD) market, which was already in decline before disruption from the pandemic made things worse.

Analyst company Trendfocus (via Storage Newsletter) writes that the HDD market saw year-on-year shipments fall 13 percent, dropping from 77 million units in Q1 2019 to 67 million in Q1 2020. The quarter-over-quarter figure was slightly worse, falling 14 percent.

The report notes that seasonal declines took much of the blame for the figures, but production disruption in China caused by Covid-19 had an effect. One bright spot was nearline enterprise HDD shipments, which reached a record 15.7 million units thanks to US cloud and China hyperscale demand. Performance enterprise HDD shipments, meanwhile, fell 12 percent QoQ.

Trendforces writes that another reason behind the decline in HDD shipments is the upcoming next-gen consoles. The Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 both use solid state drives instead of the usual hard drives found in consoles, meaning demand from the industry has fallen drastically.

Source: Storage Newsletter

Breaking down the largest vendors' market shares, Seagate remains top with around 42 percent. It's followed by WDC (37 percent) then Toshiba (21 percent).

With SSDs now cheaper and available in larger storage options, hard drives aren't as popular as they once were. With consoles and consumers abandoning the long-used technology, expect the market to rely on the enterprise sector even more in the future.