Western Digital Emerges as a Stand-Alone Hard Disk Drive Company

Western Digital is a leader in the hard disk drive market. HDDs have become a concentrated market, with only three players remaining: Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba. Seagate and Western Digital have jostled back and forth for top share over the last decade, while Toshiba remains a distant third. HDDs are being phased out in key end markets, in favor of solid-state drives, but we still see a future for HDDs within data centers. Total cost of ownership still favors HDDs over SSDs for large workloads where controlling costs is paramount while immediate read access is less important. This is commonly referred to as “nearline” storage, which we expect will make up almost all of Western’s business over time.