Unlike its industry peers, Toshiba has a rather convoluted way of introducing new hard drives: the company first unveils them globally and only then launches them to the American and European markets. However, with24TB versions of N300 and N300 Pro HDDs, things became even more complicated, as the company says that it has no plans to launch 24TB drives to Europe due to a lack of demand.
“We are currently observing a manageable demand for NAS hard drives with 24TB storage capacity on the European market,” a statement by Toshiba published byComputerBasereads. “Against this background, we will not be launching the N300 24TB model on the European market for the time being. We continuously analyze the market development and regularly validate our decision on the basis of current needs assessments.”
For now, 24TB HDDs are the highest capacity hard drives that Toshiba can offer. The company already offers nearline MG11-series 24TB HDDs in theU.S.,Europe, andAsia. However, the company only lists 24TB N300 and N300 Pro HDDs, which could be among thebest HDDstoday, inAmerica, Asia, and theU.K., but not in mainland Europe. In contrast, bothSeagateandWestern Digitalsell their 24TB and 26TB hard drives for NAS in mainland Europe, though such HDDs seem overpriced there.
Given that both of Toshiba’s rivals readily offer their highest capacity products in Europe, it is hard to imagine that there is no demand for 24TB NAS-oriented HDDs in the region.
However, there might be a more elaborate strategy in place for Toshiba. The Japanese HDD maker might be more interested in shipping its highest-capacity models to the U.S. and its partners there, as this market is more important for the company. Toshiba may also attempt to ship as many high-end HDDs to its American stock as possible before country-specific tariffs kick in this July to grab some extra market share.
If this is the case, we might see lowering shipments of other high-capacity Toshiba HDDs to mainland Europe as the company might be stockpiling them for its American customers in the U.S. Still, bear in mind that we are speculating and Toshiba hasn’t communicated its strategy in detail.
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Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
