240 exabytes of HDDs shipped in Q3 2019

Market watchers from TrendFocus estimate HDD sales in the third quarter of this year added up to a total of 240 exabytes (EB). That's 15 percent growth versus the same period a year ago and a lot of this originates from the increasing shipments of 14TB to 16TB disks to the enterprise-class nearline market. Despite the rapid adoption of SSDs, there's still a lot of demand for cheap storage.

The combined capacity of all of the hard drives sold by Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital in the third quarter totaled a whopping 240 exabytes (EB), of which 140 EB were nearline HDDs, according to TrendFocus. To put the number into perspective: the combined capacity of all HDDs and SSDs shipped last year was 912 EB and, today we are talking only about hard drives in one quarter. In fact, even when compared to Q2’s 207.5 EB, this is still 15% growth.

In terms of unit shipments, things are loss rosy. HDD unit sales totaled 83 million units last quarter, down from 88 million units in the same period in 2018. Seagate is the largest HDD maker with a marketshare of 40.2 percent, followed by WD at 35.4 percent. Toshiba takes the third place with 24.4 percent. Full details at AnandTech.