Seagate down, Toshiba up in Q1 2019 HDD market share

Here is a snapshot of disk drive supplier market shares based on capacity for first 2019 quarter.

  • Western Digital – 45.8 per cent
  • Seagate – 40.9 per cent
  • Toshiba – 13.3 per cent

In the enterprise nearline drive market the supplier positions were:

  • Western Digital – 55.7 per cent
  • Seagate – 35.2 per cent (its lowest share since 2014)
  • Toshiba – 9.1 per cent

Aaron Rakers, a Wells Fargo senior analyst, suggested hyperscale buyers are responsible for a jump in Toshiba’s share from 5.9 per cent a year ago.

He has supplied a chart showing trends in disk drive revenue, unit and capacity shipments:

And it’s a hard drive gonna fall

Revenues and units are declining as SSDs replace disk drives for mission-critical enterprise data storage and in notebooks and PCs. However, enterprises are storing more secondary data in nearline drives and that is driving capacity increases.

The chart above shows that revenue per HDD market segment is going downwards except for nearline drives – although that is a bit of a roller-coaster recently.