Get ready for some big news, according to recent incoming reports the unit shipments of hard disk drives (HDDs) demonstrated a positive dynamic in Q2 2022 for the first time in recent years. In terms of exabytes, three makers of HDDs — Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital — shipped a record of 350.7 exabytes.
These shipments were a result of the demand of operators, exascale datacenters and Chia miners. The No.1 producer of HDDs both in terms of units and in terms of exabytes shipped was crowned to Seagate who is still leading the market, but Western Digital has also almost caught up with its arch-rival in the second quarter.
Coming to a detailed analysis of the report, we have Seagate maintaining its position on the No.1 spot with 28.17 million drives and 152.3 exabytes shipped in Q2 2021. but, the company’s sales were only 2.3% up from the previous quarter. In comparison, it was the second place, Western Digital which posted an impressive 9.2% increase in unit shipments (25.4 million) and almost caught up with its rival in terms of exabytes with 148.43EB supplied.
But in terms of HDD, Western Digital showed tremendous performance. In Q2, it was at 6.13TB per drive (vs. Seagate’s 5.67TB), up from 4.72TB in Q1. This indicates that Western Digital has significantly increased shipments of its nearline/enterprise-grade drives which has allowed the company to boost its profits as well as to secure itself some heavy market share. Toshiba on the other hand has its hard drives featuring only a 3.75TB capacity on average.
During the times when the world is transitioning towards the adoption of solid-state storage, sales of all client HDDs have dropped and in such times the company’s making HDD sales is amazing. But we cannot deny the fact that a 4.51% decline in PC HDDs sales in the second quarter of 2021 is to be expected.
The most notable value which was to be seen in the research report was the number of sold 3.5-inch HDDs for nearline and enterprise applications. The number stood at a record 19.31 million, which is up almost 20% quarter over quarter. And as to why Western Digital has reported such high shipments is major because big customers have finished qualification of Western Digital’s energy-assisted HDDs.
