Toshiba Corp. expects manufacturing equipment it acquired from Western Digital earlier this year to boost its quarterly output of hard disk drives by 30% when fully installed, the company said. As a result, Toshiba hopes to become a stronger competitor to Seagate and WD both in terms of volumes and product lines.

"In calendar Q3 2011 we shipped more than 21 million HDDs, and we were able to exceed that level with our existing product lines in calendar Q2 2012. The addition of the desktop product lines will enable Toshiba to increase its capacity by 30% in late 2012," said Joel Hagberg,  vice president of marketing at storage products business unit of Toshiba America Electronic Components, in an interview with X-bit labs.

Provided that Toshiba shipped 22 million hard disk drives in calendar Q2 2012, the company will be able to supply around 28.6 million drives quarterly starting from calendar 2013 when the manufacturing equipment to make 3.5" hard disk drives is installed and fully ramped.

Despite of rather massive boost in terms of volume, Toshiba will remain a rather small player, albeit very competitive one with 3.5" drives for desktops and enterprise, 2.5" hard drives for laptops and servers as well as various solid-state drives. With recent acquisitions, Seagate's total capacities should now be over 68 million HDD units per quarter, whereas Western Digital should be able to produce over 70 million hard drives quarterly once all of its capacities in Thailand are restored.

With Toshiba's goal to double its revenue in the next few years, it should be expected that its total hard disk drive production capacities will be gradually increasing.

Tags: Toshiba, HDD, SSD, Western Digital, WD, Seagate, Business