High-capacity Drive Market Growing Strong

By Greg McNevin

August 29, 2008: IDC is tipping strong demand for high-capacity storage drives, with the EMEA hard disk market growing at 19 percent in Q2 this year.

IDC says that new data shows EMEA HDD unit shipments grew 18.8 percent to 27.3 million drives in the second quarter of 2008 compared with the same quarter last year, with PC shipments, external hard drives and new markets such as set-top boxes predominately driving growth.

Mobile-class drives (such as notebook and consumer device drives) continued to drive overall market growth at over 51 percent year on year to 6.1 million units, while enterprise-class drives grew 22.5 percent year on year to 2.6 million units.

Desktop drives remain the largest segment, and grew at 10.5 percent year on year to 18.5 million units.

“While the overall economic environment has become more troubled, the HDD market showed continued resilience, primarily due to strong demand from the technology segments,” said Claus Egge, program director for IDC's EMEA HDD research.

“The PC and external disk array markets have continued strong unit consumption fueled by demand from both businesses and consumers. At the same time the growth of external HDD drives and specialist automotive applications as well as the almost insatiable demand for higher storage capacities in all customer segments have been the foundation of strong 2008 growth.”

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