Hard disk drive sales set to grow in 2008


4 Jun 2008

Hard disk drive (HDD) sales are set to increase in 2008, despite the economic uncertainty, analyst firm IDC has said.

Fueled by ongoing prodigious demand for digital storage capacity, worldwide HDD shipments are expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate of more than 9pc between 2007 and 2012.

While Flash-based solid state disk drives (SSDs) will curtail HDD demand in some markets, according to IDC, the HDD industry will still attain consecutive year-on-year growth.

“Disk drive OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] are very aware of the different competing storage technologies that exist today and will exist in the future,” said John Rydning, research director for Hard Disk Drives at IDC.

“They will rightly shrug off these competing technologies for a later day, choosing instead to capitalise on the healthy and profitable opportunities that lie ahead in the HDD industry.”

IDC said the HDD markets least threatened by competing storage technologies, such as enterprise storage systems, personal storage devices and personal video recorders, will compose nearly half of total HDD unit shipments by 2012.

The company’s research concluded that successive generations of HDD products using perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology will enable average HDD capacities to increase by nearly threefold by 2012.

By Niall Byrne