El Segundo, Calif. — Seagate continued to lead the hard-disk-drive market by shipping 29.4 million drives during the first quarter, a lead that will only grow when the company adds the 12 million drives shipped by the recently acquired Maxtor to its total, according to the research firm iSuppli.
Worldwide HDD shipments were 101.7 million, up 16.5 percent, compared with the same period in 2005; however, shipments were slightly lower than the 103.4 million that took place during the fourth quarter of 2005. Total shipments exceeded iSuppli’s HDD forecast by about 1 percent.
“The stronger-than-expected HDD sales in the first quarter were driven by demand from the mobile PC and consumer electronics markets,” said Krishna Chander, iSuppli’s senior storage analyst.
Western Digital remained the second largest HDD vendor, with 18.8 million units shipped, followed by Hitachi GST, Maxtor and Toshiba.
