C1Q 2025 HDD Industry Update

Data is in for the first calendar quarter 2025 HDD industry from the May 2025 Digital Storage Technology Newsletter.

Total HDD shipments in C1Q 2025 were down about 9.5% compared with C4Q 2024 (28.7M versus 31.7M). Total exabytes shipped in C1Q 2025 were down about 4.4% from C4Q 2024. HDD revenues (estimated at $5.2B) were down about 8.4% from the prior quarter. This quarter saw a correction to the upward trend in exabyte shipments as well as revenues, that started four quarters ago. Nearline HDD shipments were down 12% from the prior quarter.

Western Digital shipped 12.1 million units and an estimated 179.8 Exabytes of storage capacity. Seagate shipped 11.4 million units and 143.6 Exabytes of storage. Toshiba shipped 5.2 million units and about 41.0 Exabytes of storage. Total estimated exabytes shipped were 364.4 Exabytes.

Both Seagate and Western Digital reported some potential impact on the June quarter from the trade war in their quarterly reports, but generally felt that nearline storage demand supported near term growth in storage and revenue. Note that all HDDs and most HDD components are manufactured outside of the USA.

Seagate said their HDD revenue was $2,003B in the quarter with Mass Capacity HDDs accounting for 87% of this revenue (as was the case in the prior two quarters). Total storage capacity shipped was 143.6EB with 132.9TB for all Mass Capacity and 119.7TB for Nearline HDDs, the balance of 10.7TB was shipped for legacy applications. The average HDD capacity was 12.6TB with Mass Capacity average capacity at 16.2TB and legacy average capacity at 3.3TB. The company shipped about 11.4M units in the quarter with an ASP of $175.70.

Western Digital reported that their total HDD EB shipments decreased by 6% from the prior quarter (I estimate this at 179.8EB) and that they had shipped 145EB of nearline storage. They also said that they shipped 1.9M client compute units, consumer shipped units were 1.9M and data center (cloud HDD unit shipments) were 8.3M. That means the average capacity of their nearline HDDs was about 17.5TB. The company’s ASP was $179 (up 4.1% from the prior quarter at $172) and higher than Seagate. Total HDD revenue was $2.294B. Cloud storage was about 87% of the company’s revenue in this quarter (compared to 86% in the prior quarter). These numbers increased from the prior quarter after the SanDisk spinoff.

We saw a 4.9% average sales price (ASP) increase for HDDs from C4Q 2024 to C1Q 2025. HDD ASPs are now at higher levels than seen at the end of 1998 due to the increased demand for high capacity, high ASP, HDDs and the increase in the percentage of these drives shipped, as shown below.

The figure below shows C1Q 2025 HDD market share (by total units). Toshiba total 2024 market share was about 18% with Seagate at 40% and Western Digital at 42%.

We note that the growth of capacity-oriented nearline drives for enterprise and hyperscale applications will result in more components per drive and thus higher head and media demand than in the past by 2028 and with high disk and head counts per drive, provides the biggest driver for heads and media. This could result in additional capital spending to support component growth by 2027.

HDD unit shipments, exabyte shipments and revenue were down a bit in C1Q 2025 versus C4Q 2024. HDD ASPs were the highest they have been since the late 1990’s. HDD companies projected June financials will show quarterly and YoY growth.