The Average HDD is Now 590 GB in Capacity

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A Seagate announced as part of its fiscal fourth quarter earnings report that the average hard drive shipped to customers now exceeds a size of half a terabyte.

The average size is about 590 GB, which is an increase of 39 percent year-over-year, Steve Luczo, Seagate's CEO said. Total industry demand for hard drive storage media climbed to an astounding 330,000 PB within the past year.

Seagate shipped 52 million hard drives with a combined capacity of more than 29,000 PB in the most recent quarter, while the output for the year reached 199 million units. Seagate reported revenue of $2.9 billion and net income of $119 million for the quarter.

WD slightly exceeded Samsung's shipments with about 54 million units during the quarter. WD reported revenue of $2.4 billion and a net income of about $193 million.

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Douglas Perry
31 Comments Comment from the forums
  • dgingeri
    That's it?
    Reply
  • c0oim4n
    I actually thought it would be a lot more than that, considering most computers ship with at least a 500GB HDD nowadays. And I thought that with the 2TB and 3TB drives coming along as fast as they are, more people aren't buying them to satisfy their storage needs. I know that I moderately download stuff, and I already have 700+GB worth of just movies and TV shows.
    Reply
  • niteshadow53
    What would be really interesting is if they could chart the growth of the average SSD size. Now that would be cool to see
    Reply
  • jsanthara
    At first it seems a little difficult to believe, but I guess it makes sense. A lot of people just don't have the need for a TB or more of storage space.
    Reply
  • stingstang
    3.5 Years ago I started with a 320gb drive, and 2 150gb drives. Since then, I've added a 120gb SSD, and I have yet to reach 50% capacity. I don't store thousands of illegally downloaded movies and shows, or thousands of digital photos I'll never look at, or hundreds of thousands of illegal songs. If everyone was just legit with their data, I doubt we'd need even 1tb of storage for another 3 years.
    Reply
  • Stardude82
    Does that include SSDs? I guess the lower than expected HD capacity can be attributed to the sale of cheap laptops in developing markets with 320GB or less hard drives.
    Reply
  • DXRick
    That is the dullest statistic I have seen this year.
    Reply
  • CaedenV
    stingstang3.5 Years ago I started with a 320gb drive, and 2 150gb drives. Since then, I've added a 120gb SSD, and I have yet to reach 50% capacity. I don't store thousands of illegally downloaded movies and shows, or thousands of digital photos I'll never look at, or hundreds of thousands of illegal songs. If everyone was just legit with their data, I doubt we'd need even 1tb of storage for another 3 years.
    Are you kidding? I have 2 1TB discs that are about full to the brim that has my whole movie collection (ripped and cleaned up all my DVDs), plus my music, and then projects I have done over the years. I recently did a wedding video, and the editing process alone took about 400GB for what ended up being a 2.5GB product. And dont even get me started on system drive space, I recently moved to a 500GB drive because my LEGAL programs alone take well over 200GB, and that is just Win7, and Adobe suite, office, 6-7 games, and a few utilities.

    I work at a place that does refurbished computers for people who have never used a computer before, and it baffles me when they come in a year later for repair and they only have a handful of mp3s and a few word docs on it. I mean, how do you live with less than a TB of data?
    Reply
  • dayblade
    Anyone else curious on how much Samsung HD units were actually shipped when the article is about Seagate?
    Reply
  • applegetsmelaid
    Newegg is sold out of 590GB HDDs right now.
    Reply