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disk Distant third HDD maker Toshiba spending $380 million to catch up Toshiba aims to to nearly double its LTI Philippines disk drive plant’s annual production capacity by FY2027 compared with FY2025 on a storage capacity basis. Toshiba Information Equipment (Philippines), Inc. (TIP), has three manufacturing sites; - Laguna Technopark (LTI), Biñan - historically internal and specialty HDDs (historically client drives for notebook PCs, external HDDs, multifunction printers, and set-top boxes), and recently high-capacity, nearline disk drives on a newly-expanded production line. - Laguna Technopark Annex (LTI–Annex) - enterprise SSDs, client SSDs, and printed circuit boards (not HDD assembly). - Carmelray Industrial Park (CIP), Calamba - data-center and enterprise HDDs (including nearline and helium-filled drives) for high-end and mid-range servers, storage systems, and data centers. The 30th anniversary of TIP’s manufacturing operations this month saw Toshiba say it will invest roughly 60 billion yen ($380 million) to expand facilities in the Philippines, according to Japan’s Nikkei media news site. This will enable LTI to build new hard disk drive (HDD) products that increase per-unit capacity by as much as 40 percent, with Toshiba continuing capital spending toward mass production of 65 TB-class drives in 2030 and eventually 100 TB-class drives. Toshiba currently has 11 percent share of the world-wide HDD market, behind Seagate and WD which each have round 44 percent, and intends to achieve a 30 percent share in the medium term; understood to mean 3 to 5 years. That's ambitious. However, HDD demand currently is greater than supply, with Seagate's 2026 manufacturing capacity sold out and both Seagate and WD having signed long-term supply agreements with major customers to ensure deliveries and pricing of the nearline, high-capacity drives needed to store their bulk, warm data. Theoretically, Toshiba could increase its manufacturing capacity output and capture market share without either Seagate or WD selling less capacity. The road to capacity increases depends upon recording technologies and a drive's internal platter count. Seagate's drives have 10 platters and it increases capacity by improving the areal density of its Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology, with 4 TB-class platters qualified with some hyperscalers now, 5 TB-class platters in development, and a roadmap out to10 TB-class platters, and hence 100 TB drives, by 2030. WD and Toshiba both use 11-platter drives, giving them an easier task areal density-wise, and WD has been able to push its enhanced perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR) technology out to 26 TB with this CMR (conventional magnetic recording) method and 32 TB using shingled magnetic recording (SMR) with partially overlapped write tracks increasing track density, and thereby overall capacity, on a platter without having to increase overall density. It's talked about increasing the number of platters further, with 14 mentioned in February. In February it also predicted it would deliver 40 TB drives this year, with ePMR and HAMR variants. A 44 TB HAMR drive will follow later this year, with 60 TB ePMR and HAMR drives in 2028 and 100 TB HAMR drives in 2029, before Seagate. It sees ePMR technology being unable to advance much further past 60 TB drives. Toshiba is currently at the 11 platter level and has no HAMR drives in production, using Flux-Controlled Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording (FC-MAMR), a variation on PMR, instead. It began sampling 30 to 34 TB, 11-platter M12 SMR disc drives aimed at hyper scales and cloud service providers in March, with sample shipping of 28 TB M12 CMR drives planned for the third 2026 quarter. It has not said if this took place. HAMR technolog is on its roadmap. It could double the LTI plant's output capacity from 2025 to 2027 by increasing the number of drives it manufactures, and also increasing drive capacity by adding platters and again by upping the areal density per platter. We think Toshiba will shortly announce that its higher capacity M12 drives are shipping.
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