75.7 million personal and entry level storage products shipped in 2014 and that means the market was essentially flat.
IDC estimated that annual shipment values fell 1.5 percent compared to 2013, with a value of $6.6 billion.
Personal stort age suffered from competition from public cloud providers and people started using online streaming more, said IDC.
The entry level market is largely dominated by vendors that don’t make hard drives but their share fell as much as 17.6 percent compared to the year before.
USB continues to be the choice for the personal and entry level storage market, while Ethernet is preferred for entry level market. Thunderbolt based devices fell by 5.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2014, the first time it had showed a decline.
Devices with over four terabytes of storage now account for a third of all shipments in the quarter.
