A report by StorageNewsletter reveals that hard drive shipments have declined by 15% this quarter, thanks to weak PC market demand and OEM demand. But despite this, the total hard drive shipped capacity has only dropped by 2%, thanks to increasingly large HDDs.
Seagate suffered a 14% unit reduction this quarter, falling to a total of 19.88 million hard drives shipped. Nearline drives declined by 5% to 8.61 million as well, however average nearline drive capacity increased by 1.2TB to 14.4TB on average. Nearline is a type of storage acting as a middle ground between offline storage (infrequent data access) and online storage (data that's accessed constantly).
Performance enterprise units shipped also fell by 10% quarter over quarter to 1.63 million units. But despite these quarterly setbacks, shipments for Nearline units and NAS and surveillance HDDs have gone up by 4% and 8% respectively.
StorageNewsletter also says that all other Seagate segments have seen double-digit declines thanks to weak consumer spending and the continued strength of SSD adoption.
Toshiba is facing a similar fate with its shipped capacity of 16.18EB plunging by 15% quarter over quarter. Unit values also fell by 17% over the same quarterly period to 8.29 million. Quarterly nearline shipments fell by 17% to 2.09 million units, and the total shipped capacity of 26.88EB declined 15% sequentially. Performance enterprise drives also came down by 3% quarter over quarter.
WDC saw similar dips in HDD units and capacity shipped, with a 17% reduction in units to 16.48 million hard drives, and all other segments declined by double-digits during the quarter.
Overall, the storage industry is facing a large drop in demand, due to the weakened PC market overall in 2022, and a continuous increase in SSD demand fueling hard drive replacements. Overall storage capacity shipped hasn't dropped much, however. This indicates larger capacity hard drives are becoming more mainstream, while lower capacity 1TB and even 2TB drives are being replaced by SSDs.
