Worldwide personal and entry-level storage shipments declined by -6.4% year over year and -13.6% sequentially, finishing the first quarter of 2015 with 17.6 million units.

According to the International Data Corporation, shipment values declined along with unit shipments, down -11.6% from a year ago to $1.5 billion.

"Broadly speaking, the size of this market has changed little over the past two and a half years,” explains Jingwen Li, research analyst, Storage systems, at IDC.

“This is partly due to competition from public cloud offerings and partly due to a fundamental shift of media consumption preferences.

"It's important to note, however, that there are still untapped growth opportunities within this market,” Li says. “Personal and entry level NAS, for example, would benefit greatly from an increased level of marketing programmess focused on building awareness."

IDC says dual interface products grew at a significant rate of 56.7% year over year, albeit off a small base.

USB/Thunderbolt and USB/WiFi offerings contributed most of the growth of this category and continued to benefit from a shift away from eSATA, FireWire, and Thunderbolt-only offerings.

The analyst firm explains that for the first quarter of 2015, HDD vendors continued to increase their share in total PELS units shipped, gaining 0.8 percentage point year over year to grow to 78.8% market share.

Mainstream non-HDD vendors dominated the entry-level storage segment, but lost market share to HDD vendors. In 1Q15, HDD vendors gained 13.2 percentage points from a year ago to represent 23.2% of the entry-level storage market.