Western Digital: More than 800,000 11-disk hard drives with 26 to 32 TB sold
Western Digital: More than 800,000 11-disk hard drives with 26 to 32 TB sold
Image: Business Wire
Western Digital is now a pure-play hard drive manufacturer and is reporting its first quarterly figures without the flash business. Thanks to higher average prices, margins increased by 10 percentage points year-on-year. Around 800,000 of the 12.1 million hard drives sold were the highest-grade hard drives with 26 to 32 TB capacities.
Hard drive sales defy global crises
Mechanical hard drives have often been overtaken by the triumphant march of SSDs. But growing demand among cloud and AI data centers is giving the hard drive market a boost. Overall, more will be discontinued, and average prices will increase in line with the storage capacity per drive.
In the third quarter of 2025, Western Digital sold 12.1 million units less than in the previous quarter (13.5 million), but 400,000 more than in the same period last year. More importantly, however, average prices have increased, so that a hard drive cost $145 the previous year and is now $179.
Irving Tan, CEO of Western Digital
Revenue of $2.294 billion is 5% higher than in the second quarter of 2025, but a whopping 31% above the previous year’s result. Margin increased from 30.1% in the same period to 40.1%. New CEO Irving Tan considers this achievement remarkable given the current dangerous geopolitical situation in the world. On the other hand, the exponential growth of data is constant, something the storage industry can only welcome.
Large 11-plated hard drives are doing well.
Models with the highest storage capacities, in particular, are obviously in high demand. According to Western Digital, more than 800,000 hard drives with 11 magnetic stripes (platters) have been shipped in the last three months.
These include CMR models with up to 26 TB and SMR models with up to 32 TB. CMR stands for Conventional Magnetic Recording, while SMR stands for Shingled Magnetic Recording. With SMR technology, approximately 20% more data per drive can be secured by overlapping data traces (tracks), but overwriting results in a performance penalty because all adjacent traces must also be updated.
800k+ 11-disk drives with capacities up to 26 TB CMR and 32 TB UltraSMR are shipping. Western Digital
Western Digital is confident that with its previous technologies such as EPMR and Opti-Nand, storage capacities can be further increased to around 36 TB. After that, however, the switch to thermally assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) is expected. The latest public roadmap mentions the end of 2026.
Western Digital HDD Roadmap (February 2025) (Image: Western Digital)
Seagate has already marketed HAMR with 30 TB and 32 TB HDDs and introduced 36 TB models. However, Seagate has not yet made any public announcements about sales, as Western Digital has now done for its flagship products. The HAMR market has long been mature, and Seagate’s first HAMR hard drives were also only available in small batches for large businesses.
Topics: Hard Drives Quarties Storage Western Digital Business Source: Western Digital
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