During their last quarterly investors webinar both Seagate Technology and Western Digital focused up their exabytes shipped hard disk drive storage capacity and their revenue and profits. However, they did not provide information that they have done in past quarters that would give investors important operational information such as the number of HDD shipped and particularly the number of high-capacity nearline HDDs shipped.
They also did not give information from which the average HDD sales price, ASP could be determined. I think that these are important elements to include in HDD quarterly reporting and that investors should be asking for this information to understand important dynamics in the market and to make prudent investing decisions.
I have been covering the hard disk drive industry for over 20 years and have over 40 years of experience in this industry as an engineer, engineering manager and more recently as a consultant. I have also been writing about the industry in these blogs for many years.
Late last week Seagate Technology and Western Digital reported their CQ3 ’25 quarterly results. While the reports from both companies were favorable, I noticed that they are making it harder than in past quarters to figure out how many hard disk drives were shipped overall, and in particular the number high-capacity HDDs shipped for use in data centers. In addition, both companies made it harder to calculate the average sales price of their shipped HDDs.
I think this is a problem and I’ll tell you why. While shipping to meet exabyte requirements, these requirements are met by the number of HDDs delivered times the average capacity of those HDDs. But, if we only know the total capacity shipped and not the unit shipments, we may not know if there were production or yield issues limiting HDD unit production or if the company is limiting possible production to decrease the supply and increase or stabilize unit prices.
Before the recent quarterly reports, I note that many investors were observing that demand for hard disk drives was exceeding supply and they were trying to figure out why this was so. I believe that this is mostly due to increased storage demand to support data intensive workloads, like AI. But what if the HDD companies cut their unit production to drive up prices and thus revenues? Or what if there were yield or other production issues that resulted in shortages, wouldn’t investors want to know that?
Both company’s reported shipping more exabytes of digital storage capacity in the last quarter. I estimate that the total shipped exabytes of capacity for the industry, including WDC, Seagate and Toshiba, increased by 4.9% over the prior quarter (from about 395EB to about 414EB). This is up a from the 4% gain in shipped EB capacity in the prior quarter. This is good news of course, but both companies accomplish these EB shipments by the cumulative capacity of the hard disk drives that they ship.
The exabytes shipped can be represented by the number of HDDs shipped multiplied by the average capacity of those shipped HDDs. With Seagate’s quarterly results I was able to make an estimate of the total shipped drives from their report of 182EB of total HDD shipped capacity and an average capacity of those shipped drives of 14.6TB. Divide the 182EB by 14.6TB and you get 12.47M HDD units shipped that quarter. That is about what Seagate shipped the prior quarter, 12.5M units.
Seagate gave no guidance on the number of nearline HDD shipped although they did say that of the 182EB of total shipped HDD capacity, 159EB of that was for nearline applications, with most of these nearline drives used in data centers. But they didn’t say how many actual nearline drives shipped, or give any information, like in prior quarters, that could help determine this number, such as the average capacity of shipped high-capacity HDDs, such as in the past.
In the prior quarter, CQ2 ‘25 Seagate said that the nearline capacity shipments were about 137EB out of 150.9EB of mass capacity shipments, or 86% of their total shipped capacity. The average mass-capacity per drive storage capacity was 16.5TB. If we assume that this was also the average capacity of the nearline HDDs, which made up close to 90% of the total of their shipped mass capacity HDD units, we get an estimate of 8.3M nearline drives shipped in that quarter.
I estimate that that total nearline drives unit shipments in CQ2 ‘25 was about 65% of the total shipped HDD units. In that quarter Seagate said they shipped 162.5EB of total storage capacity with an average HDD capacity of 13TB. This gave a total of 12.5M HDDs shipped that quarter and the estimated nearline shipments from Seagate were about 66% of the total shipped units.
The high capacity nearline HDDs are the major growth market for HDDs and understanding now many of these were sold can tell us important information concerning the companies that, I think, should be of interest to investors. During the most recent Seagate earnings report the company said, referring to the growth of HAMR HDD shipments, that it had shipped “nearly 80% of nearline volume at or above 24 terabytes per drive in September 2025.”
I tried to figure out from this information how many nearline HDDs Seagate shipped this last quarter. If the average shipping capacity in CQ3 ’25 was the same as the prior quarter, 16.5TB then they would have shipped 159EB/16.5TB = 9.6M units, 1.3M units more than the prior quarter. But the average capacity of the shipped nearline HDDs was likely more. Since they said they shipped nearly 80% of nearline drives in September that were at least 24 TB, perhaps the average HDD capacity shipped over the entire quarter jumped to 24TB for the entire quarter. That would mean they shipped 159EB/24TB = 6.6M HDD, down 1.7M units from the prior quarter.
With the information we are given we don’t know if they shipped more than the prior quarter or considerably less. Wouldn’t investors like to know this information, especially if the company shipped less nearline HDDs than the prior quarter?
Western Digital provided even less information about their total and nearline HDD shipments. They only said that they had shipped 2.2M units of their latest generation ePMR HDDs. In the prior quarter, CQ2 ‘25 WDC said that they had shipped 12.9M HDDs and 9.3 Cloud HDDs, the cloud HDDs are the nearline HDDs that they shipped. So, did they ship more, less or the same total HDD units in the most recent quarter? We just don’t know. What if they shipped less? Wouldn’t investors like to know that.
In CQ2 ’25 WDC reported that their total revenue, presumably from HDDs, rather than systems, was $2,605M and if we divide that by the total number of HDD units shipped in the quarter, 12.9M we get an average sales price, ASP, of $201.9 per HDD unit.
In CQ2 ’25 Seagate reported separated their HDD revenue of $2,281M from their systems, SSD and other revenue of $163M. They also reported that the total capacity shipped was 162.5EB with the average capacity per drive of 13TB, if we divide the total capacity shipped by the average drive capacity, we get 12.5M units. Dividing the HDD only revenue by the number of HDDs shipped we get an ASP of $182.48.
In the CQ3 ’25 investor webinar Seagate reported that their total revenue was $2,629M. They broke out the data center, nearline and perhaps systems revenue, of $2,114M and Edge IoT revenue of $515M. The data center revenue was 80% of the total revenue. However, they didn’t report the HDD only revenue.
So, to make an estimate of the HDD ASP we have to have an estimate of the HDD only revenue, which was not broken out. If we estimate that this was $165M, a bit more than in the prior quarter and thus reflected some higher system sales then the HDD only revenue would be $2,464M. Dividing that number by the 12.49M HDD units shipped we get an estimate of the Seagate HDD ASP of $197.3, 8% higher than in the prior quarter.
For many prior quarters WDC reported ASPs that were higher than those of Seagate, so that was probably the case this last quarter, but again, we don’t know, since the company did not give information that allows us to calculate the ASP.
The chart from Coughlin Associates, below, shows the ASP of HDDs since the late 1990’s until the last quarter, with that quarter estimated from the Seagate information.
ASP growth since 2015 has been largely due to the decline in non-nearline HDD unit shipments and the growth in nearline HDD unit shipments. As nearline HDDs have become a greater percentage of the total HDD shipments over the last few years, and particularly with the growing demand for nearline HDDs, the ASPs have grown significantly quarter by quarter.
While not a direct indication of the average sales price of nearline HDDs, the total HDD ASP is an indication of the growth in neon arline unit shipments and perhaps also nearline HDD average sales prices. Nearline HDD prices increasingly dominate these prices, with these drives comprising at least 65% in CQ2 ’25 and likely an even higher percentage in CQ3 ’25 and an even greater percentage in the future. A drop in ASPs from a prior quarter would certainly indicate that something had happened to demand and would likely also have a negative impact on revenue.
But without ASP information, we would hot have this guidance on HDD average prices, which I think investors would like to know.
WDC and Seagate changed their quarterly investor reports this last quarter, limiting investor information on total HDD and particularly nearline units shipped as well as information on ASPs. This obscures some important information that investor might like to know.
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