Design Article
Hard disk drive market to decline 12%
Dylan McGrath
2/4/2013 2:15 PM EST
The rise of ultrabooks
IHS said HDDs would continue to be part of the storage solution even in ultrabooks--the Intel-backed ultrathin, power thrifty laptops that feature SSDs. The solution, which cobbles hard disk drives together with a so-called cache SSD module, boasts of a superior price-value proposition compared to SSD-only counterparts, IHS said.
A major growth area for HDDs in coming years will be in the business sector, spanning the enterprise space, cloud storage, big data and big-data analytics, according to IHS. Bearing the lowest cost of any storage medium now on the market, HDDs will remain the final destination for the majority of digital content that need to be filed away, IHS said. IHS noted that later this year Western Digital Corp. is expected to launch a 5-terabyte Helium HDD, catering mostly to data centers for enterprise servers and storage applications.
Western Digital is expected to continue battling archrival Seagate Technology for market leadership in both revenue and shipments, especially in the enterprise business segment, IHS said. While Seagate had a 50 percent share of the enterprise market last year, the introduction by Western Digital of its new helium technology could catapult the manufacturer to the top at the end of 2013, according to the research firm.
IHS said it expects similar losses in both revenue and shipments in the market for PC optical disk drives--including discs like CDs and DVDs. IHS said optical drives could eventually be abandoned altogether by PC makers.
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IHS said HDDs would continue to be part of the storage solution even in ultrabooks--the Intel-backed ultrathin, power thrifty laptops that feature SSDs. The solution, which cobbles hard disk drives together with a so-called cache SSD module, boasts of a superior price-value proposition compared to SSD-only counterparts, IHS said.
A major growth area for HDDs in coming years will be in the business sector, spanning the enterprise space, cloud storage, big data and big-data analytics, according to IHS. Bearing the lowest cost of any storage medium now on the market, HDDs will remain the final destination for the majority of digital content that need to be filed away, IHS said. IHS noted that later this year Western Digital Corp. is expected to launch a 5-terabyte Helium HDD, catering mostly to data centers for enterprise servers and storage applications.
Western Digital is expected to continue battling archrival Seagate Technology for market leadership in both revenue and shipments, especially in the enterprise business segment, IHS said. While Seagate had a 50 percent share of the enterprise market last year, the introduction by Western Digital of its new helium technology could catapult the manufacturer to the top at the end of 2013, according to the research firm.
IHS said it expects similar losses in both revenue and shipments in the market for PC optical disk drives--including discs like CDs and DVDs. IHS said optical drives could eventually be abandoned altogether by PC makers.
Related stories:
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daleste
2/4/2013 9:48 PM EST
I expect the "cloud" to be about the only place consumers will store their data. Plus maybe a USB drive for sensitive stuff. Businesses will still use HDDs for some time. I do expect the CD/DVD drive to disappear much quicker than the HDD.
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eewiz
2/5/2013 5:00 AM EST
Expected to happen.. My question is what WDC and Seagate is planning to do abt it . They even acquired the ailing HDD divisions from samsung, hitachi,maxtor..
Are they going to stand still and enjoy the inevitable slow death OR jump into SSD march with the current 100 other companies and sell commodity SSD drives. OR do some interesting hybrid of HDD & SSD. The current hybrid HDDs are only good for boot speed.
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