Hard drive market to stagnate as demand for tablets, flash, cloud and SSDs grows

Hard disk drive (HDD) sales will continue slowing down due to growing tablet sales and increased competition from flash and SSD storage, according to figures from IHS iSuppli.

Revenue growth in the HDD market is predicted to increase by just four per cent in 2011 to $28.1bn, less than half the increase in 2010.

Incremental increases in revenue are predicted to continue through to 2015, when the HDD market is set to peak at $32bn.

HDD enterprise demand is set to remain strong as firms invest in corporate PCs, servers and storage virtualisation infrastructure, IHS iSuppli added.

However, the overall importance of HDDs will continue to reduce as smartphones and tablets become the primary medium of content consumption, according to Fang Zhang, an analyst for storage systems at IHS iSuppli.

"Tablets in particular are gobbling up consumer dollars originally intended for notebook and netbook computers," she said.

"And because tablets use flash memory for data storage, rather than HDDs, this has translated into lost sales for the hard drive industry."

In addition to the rise of flash memory, a number of other factors will contribute to the slow increase of the HDD market.

Manufacturers continue to introduce lower-priced drives with higher densities, and SSDs are increasingly appearing in traditional hard drive strongholds such as netbooks, Zhang said.

The increasing adoption of cloud-based storage services by consumers and enterprises is also going to have an impact on the HDD market, she noted.

Meanwhile, the optical disk drive (ODD) market for computers will rise by approximately two per cent in the second quarter this year to $3bn.

Five-year growth for computer ODDs will be flat at the end of 2015, generating $12.7bn in revenue.