03 June 2008

Appetite For Digital Storage Drives HDD Market

The world’s insatiable appetite for digital storage capacity is continuing to drive the hard disk drive (HDD) market, according to a report.

Global HDD shipments are forecast to grow in 2008, even in the face of economic uncertainty in the United States, and increase at a compound annual growth rate of more than 9% between 2007 and 2012, according to market research company IDC.

Flash-based solid state disk drives (SSDs) will hobble HDD demand in some markets, but despite competition in certain storage sectors, HDD shipments and revenues are in for another record breaking year, according to IDC.

HDD markets least threatened by competing storage technologies such as enterprise storage systems, personal storage devices, and personal video recorders, will compose nearly 50% of total HDD unit shipments by 2012. IDC said.