Shipments of enterprise nearline hard drives for data centres could grow at an average annual rate of 23% from 2025 to 2030, The Elec reported, citing a TrendForce forecast.
Demand is being supported by investment in AI infrastructure, the expansion of cloud services, higher semiconductor prices and the economics of HDD storage for large data sets. The forecast concerns enterprise nearline drives rather than the entire hard-drive market.
Manufacturers are increasing drive capacities and preparing new generations of products:
- Western Digital is qualifying drives of about 40TB and has a roadmap to raise HDD capacity to 100TB by 2029;
- Seagate is shipping HAMR drives with capacities of up to 44TB to cloud providers;
- Toshiba offers 12-platter models with capacities of 30–34TB and plans 40TB-class drives in 2027.
Suppliers of magnetic heads, disk media, glass substrates and other components are also expanding capacity. They include TDK, Resonac, HOYA, JX Advanced Metals and Nitto Denko.
Resonac separately said it will increase annual magnetic-disk capacity from about 160 million to 210 million units, a 31% rise. Singapore will become its central production hub, with additional lines entering operation gradually from 2027.
The company links medium- and long-term demand growth to generative AI and cloud services. Manufacturers’ roadmaps, however, do not guarantee that every announced capacity will reach the market on the stated schedule.
