From quantity to quality: HDD sales are decreasing, but their total capacity is growing

TrendFocus has analyzed the global hard disk drive (HDD) market for the last quarter of 2023 and found that total HDD production increased by 9% (compared to the previous quarter), but shipments decreased by 0.6% to 28.85 million units. In the fourth quarter of 2023, 27.6 to 29.7 million HDDs of all types were sold, which is 3.7% less than in the third quarter of the year. This signals that the hard disk drive market is adapting to the emergence of another player in the market space - a new flash drive technology, NAND.

Seagate is the HDD manufacturing leader, covering 40% of the market. In the last quarter of 2023, the company sold 11.54 million HDDs with a total capacity of 95.13 Ebytes, which is 6% more than in the third quarter of 2023. As for Nearline drives, Seagate's sales in this segment increased by 8% to 4.53 million units, with a total capacity of 70.98 Ebytes. Demand for enterprise HDDs also increased by 8%.

Western Digital ranks second among the largest HDD vendors, covering 37.5% of the market. In the fourth quarter of 2023, the company sold 10.81 million units. The capacity of the drives increased by 14%, and the average capacity equaled 8.36 TB. Western Digital saw a 20% increase in demand for Nearline drives.

At the same time, 2023 set a record for the decrease in the cost of SSDs. In the second half of last year, the cost of a 1 TB SSD drive was almost identical to the cost of a 1 TB HDD. It means that HDDs are not losing their relevance, and it can be traced through the growth of the total capacity of HDDs sold, even with a decrease in the number of sold units.

At the moment, the trend for HDDs is to increase the capacity of HDDs for the corporate segment. For example, in August 2023, Seagate presented a hard drive with a new HAMR technology that allows storing up to 37 TB of data. As for Seagate, experts predict an increase in the capacity of one HDD with HAMR technology to 50+ TB by 2026, and later - up to 120 TB.

Enterprise-level HDDs are doing well, while consumer-level HDDs are losing ground. However, in the coming years, the focus is expected to shift from the number of units sold to the HDD capacity parameter.