The data is in for the C3Q 2024 HDD shipments from the upcoming November 2024 Digital Storage Technology Newsletter.
Total HDD shipments in C3Q 2024 were up about 6.0% compared with C2Q 2024 (32.1M versus 30.3M). Total exabytes shipped in C3Q 2024 were up about 17% from C2Q 2024, driven by greater sales of mass storage HDDs, such as nearline drives. HDD revenues (estimated at $4.51B) were up about 12.1% from the prior quarter. This quarter continued the upward trend in unit and exabyte shipments as well as revenues, that started three quarters ago.
Seagate said their HDD revenue was $2.004B in the quarter with Mass Capacity HDDs accounting for 87% of this revenue. Total storage capacity shipped was 137.5EB with 128.0 for Mass Capacity and 109.1TB for Nearline HDDs, the balance of 9.5EB was shipped for legacy applications. The average HDD capacity was 10.6TB with Mass Capacity average capacity at 14.3TB and legacy average capacity at 2.4TB. The company shipped about 13M units in the quarter with an ASP of $154.51.
Western Digital reported that their total HDD EB shipments increased by 14% from the prior quarter (I estimate this at 184.8EB) and that they had shipped 141EB of nearline storage. They also said that they shipped 2.3M client compute units, consumer shipped units were 1.9M and data center (cloud HDD unit shipments) were 9.0M. That means the average capacity of their nearline HDDs was about 15.7TB. The company’s ASP was $164 (up slightly from the prior quarter at $163). Total HDD revenue was $2.211B. Cloud storage was about 53% of the company’s revenue in this quarter (compared to 50% in the prior quarter).
We saw a 4.9% average sales price (ASP) increase for HDDs from C2Q 2024 to C3Q 2024. HDD ASPs are now at levels last seen at the end of 1998 due to the increased demand for high capacity, high ASP, HDDs.
The figure shows 2024 HDD market share to date (by units). Note that Toshiba C3Q 2024 market share was about 18.5%, down from 19.5% in the prior quarter. Total year to date percentage for Toshiba is 20%, including C1Q 2024 share of about 22%.
The figure below shows high, median and low estimates of total drive unit volume estimates out to 2029. Note that based upon performance so far this year, we are projecting about 30M HDDs shipped in C4Q 24 and thus have increased our total 2024 HDD shipment estimates. In particular we are projecting a bit over 124M units shipping in 2024, up 1.9% from 2023 shipments. If this is so, this will be the first year of increasing year/year revenues from the prior year since peak shipments in 2010! Of course, this increase is due to a recovery from much lower HDD shipments in 2023 due to excess customer inventories.
The increase in HDD prices indicate greater growth and a greater percentage of sales of nearline and other mass storage HDDs. It also indicates that demand is now greater than supply. Seagate and Western Digital indicating that they are doing long term agreements with enterprise and data center customers to deal the growth in demand. Note that all the HDD companies idled capacity during the downturn of the last couple of years.
Total HDD unit shipments in C3Q 2024 were up about 6% from the prior quarter, marking a fourth turn-around quarter for HDD demand. Capacity shipments were up 17% from the prior quarter and revenues were up about 12.1%. Several HAMR HDD qualification have been completed and there should be significant shipments of HAMR HDDs in 2024 and going into 2025.
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