Benefiting from its strategy of adopting own-brand hard drives in its own-brand IT products such as notebooks, Samsung Electronics hard drive shipments have a chance to surpass those of Toshiba in the second half of 2010, according to sources from hard drive makers.

Toshiba was the fourth largest hard drive maker worldwide in 2009 with a 13.3% market share, behind Seagate, Western Digital and Hitachi GST, while Samsung only had a market share of 9.2% and shipments of 51.64 million units. However, in the first quarter of 2010, Samsung's shipments picked up quickly to about 15.5 million units with a 9.5% market share, only slightly behind Toshiba's 17.5 million units and 10.7% market share, according to sources citing figures from IDC.

Since Samsung is also grabbing orders from PC brands using price competition, the company is aiming to ship 100 million hard drives in 2010, up from 50 million units in 2009, the sources noted.

However, Toshiba is still confident about its future shipments and believes its 2.5-inch hard drive business will still see shipment growth in the fourth quarter despite that demand for its 1.8-inch hard drives is dropping.