Hard Drive Demand to Keep Growing

By Greg McNevin

June 5, 2008: As the world’s appetite for digital storage capacity exponentially expands, the analysts at IDC have made the astute observation that demand for HDDs will continue to grow.

While new technologies such as NAND flash storage are taking bites out of the market, IDC says that the sheer hunger for capacity means that traditional hard disk drives are still attracting most demand and revenue.

Even in the face of economic uncertainty in the United States, worldwide HDD shipments are expected to grow in 2008, and do so at a compound annual growth rate of more than 9 percent between 2007 and 2012.

IDC forecasts Flash-based solid state disk drives (SSDs) curtailing HDD demand in some markets, but says that the HDD industry will shrug-off these and other competing storage technologies to attain consecutive years of record-setting HDD shipments and revenue.

“Disk drive OEMs 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 hard disk drive industry.”

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