EL SEGUNDO, CA – Global shipments of hard disk drives rose 15.5% in 2006 as suppliers capitalized on growth opportunities while shrugging off challenges including price wars, component shortages and competitive upheavals. The HDD industry shipped 434.2 million hard drives last year, up from 375.8 million in 2005, according to new data from iSuppli. Fourth quarter shipments hit 119.7 million, up 15.8% year-over-year and 8.3% sequentially. 2007 shipments are expected to rise by about 17%, the research firm forecast. For the year, 2.6 million external HDDs were shipped, up 37% from 2005.  Seagate Technology’s acquisition of competitor Maxtor spurred a price war in the first half of 2006, the firm said. Shortages of glass media, along with minor shortfalls of other components, were seen near the end of the year. Meanwhile, demand slowed for 1-inch HDDs because makers of MP3 players increasingly are turning toward flash memory for music files. Furthermore, 2006 saw the rise of NAND flash-based drives. The arrival of Microsoft’s Vista PC operating system and the introduction of Intel’s Robson have stimulated interest in the usage of flash memory for PC storage applications, according to iSuppli. The two leading HDD suppliers made gains in fourth quarter. Seagate’s share of 34.6% was up a notch from 34.3% in the third quarter. WDC held second place at 20.5%, up from 19.9%. No. 3 Hitachi GST fell 0.3 points to 17.2%.