WD has exhausted production capacity for 2026. Expect hard drives to remain expensive for some time.
Hard drive prices will continue to be high for some time as data center AI needs continue to consume storage and drive up prices for everyone.
One of the main talking points about artificial intelligence was its impact on memory prices. Demand has made components more expensive for manufacturers like Apple, as well as for consumers, by building the infrastructure needed for AI.
Memory may have grabbed the headlines, but it’s far from the only component feeling the pinch. This is also happening in the hard drive market.
During the second-quarter earnings call for drive maker Western Digital, CEO Irving Tan confirmed that strong demand from its business customers had rocked the boat. TweakTown reports that the company has virtually exhausted production capacity for drives in 2026, even this early in the year.
WD has orders from seven of its largest enterprise customers, including long-term contracts for two in 2027. One client even has a capacity contract in 2028.
Currently, Western Digital’s capacity is largely made up of enterprise customers, with approximately 89% of its total revenue coming from cloud companies. In contrast, consumer hard drives make up only 5% of its revenue.
Price alert
The AI infrastructure’s interest in data storage has expanded its needs to hard drives, which are a relatively inexpensive way to store data, albeit without the speed benefits of flash memory used in SSDs. The result is essentially the same situation for mechanical drives as for memories.
Hard drive prices are already at their highest in two years. With WD’s CEO warning that its own capacity isn’t enough to cover the huge scale of demand for AI, it means the supply of consumer drives will be tighter than usual.
Based on the usual economics of supply and demand, you can expect hard drive prices to rise, or at least stay elevated for some time.
If the rapid rise in memory prices is any indicator, hard drives could see a similar rise in the short term.
Get them while they’re hot
For Apple, the prices of hard drives are not a real problem for its products because it uses flash memories and SSDs instead of mechanical drives. It also has agreements in place with suppliers that insulate the supply chain from price increases for at least a few quarters.
However, consumers do not have this luxury at all. Instead, they are at the whim of retailers and whatever they charge.
With this issue in mind, anyone looking to add more storage to their computing setup should strongly consider getting a drive sooner rather than later.
AppleInsider has repeatedly recommended using an external drive option to increase your Mac’s storage capacity, due to Apple’s relatively high fees for increasing internal storage at the time of purchase. With the abundance of external drive enclosures and NAS drives on the market, adding expansion is now a fairly easy process.
Some proposed drive options that can be utilized now include: