In this article we look at Nidec projections for HDD spindle motor demand and analyze what this may mean for HDD demand this year and into 2024 and 2025. We also look at a recent announcement by Nyriad of their HDD-based UltraIO-as-a-Service on premise storage offering.
Nidec supplies more than 70% of the spindle motors used in the HDD industry. Spindle motors and other HDD components need to be ordered and shipped in advance of their being assembled into HDDs, thus Nidec quarterly results can give some insights into projected demand for HDDs in the following quarter.
The company’s June 2023 report said that the number of spindle motors shipped in the HDD market decreased by more than 30% in calendar year 2022 from 259M units to 172M units. It projected that HDD unit shipments in 2023 would decrease by about 27% from 2022 to 2023 (172M units to 126M units). See the relevant slide from the June Nidec 2023 report below. Nidec projects slight unit growth in 2024 and 2025, driven by capacity HDDs for servers.
The September 30th 2023 report from Nidec showed the most recent quarter unit shipments down from 31M in the prior quarter to 30M. The company is putting more emphasis on motors for automotive and other markets to provide growth for their small motor products. Following these Nidec projections HDD unit growth anticipated in 2024 and 2025 is projected to be minimal.
But data growth is expected and inventories of storage devices at data centers in including HDDs and SSDs is expected to be depleted by the end of 2024. With high projections for data growth from IoT devices of all sorts and the use of data to support AI workloads there is widespread anticipation that storage demand could grow in 2024 and the following years. SSD and HDD companies have cut back on their production this year and SSD prices are expected to rise in the 4th quarter of 2023.
So, the Nidec projections for HDD demand may either anticipate more incursion of SSDs into HDD secondary storage or that anticipated HDD demand is projected to be too small in 2024 and the following years. If the latter is true, then the HDD component suppliers such as Nidec as well as the three HDD companies, Seagate, WDC and Toshiba may not be ready for a robust rebound in HDD demand. This scenario would lead to temporary HDD shortages until the HDD supply chain and the HDD companies could put back on line their idled production capacity.
Nyriad announced the launch of its UltraIO-as-a-Service, an on-premise Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS) offering. Nyraid makes GPU-accelerated storage systems that leverage HDD storage for excellent performance, cost-effectiveness and resilience. The combination of GPUs and CPUs enable advanced erasure coding techniques and it able to achieve up to 92% utilization of raw storage capacity.
The company said that its STaaS offering focuses on three core customer-friendly tenets: capacity flexibility, billing flexibility and operational simplicity. In particular billing is based on the capacity used with comprehensive reporting on storage consumption and system usage. Burst capacity prices are the same as on-demand prices per GB. The company says that it has round-the-clock proactive support with its service-level agreements.
Nidec HDD spindle motor projection bode slow growth in HDD shipments in 2024 and 2025. Nyraid announces its UltraIO-as-a-Service on premise storage offering.
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