14 DAY TRIAL // Even with the HDD market in supposedly dangerous waters, analysts foresee only great things for the few companies still serving in this field.
One would think that with the HDD market still struggling, the prospects of Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba would be a bit bleaker, at least in the short term.
The truth is far more promising for these companies, however, even as consumers continue to boggle at how overpriced all units are.
According to the HDD information service of Trendfocus, the HDD market is going upwards fast, due to accumulated demand and recovering supply chain.
Supply will stay tight, but the cost rise for each unit is not enough to make prospective buyers turn to solid state drives. In fact, hard drives are still said to have a 10X price advantage.
“HDDs will remain the king of storage for years, and will coexist with NAND flash in most applications,” stated Mark Geenen, president of Trendfocus.
“Global storage requirements are growing more than 40% annually, and demand from both the personal computer market and HDD-enabled CE devices will support tremendous expansion over the coming years.”
In 2011, over 335 exabytes of information were shipped, a figure that is poised to grow by a factor of three by 2014 (to 960 exabytes).
On that note, 2.3 billion HDDs will be shipped in the next three years, to regular buyers, servers, data centers, etc.
“Considering the challenges and opportunities, TRENDFOCUS views the HDD industry’s future positively. Our outlook is for over 830 million HDDs to ship in 2014 a robust 10% CAGR” added Geenen.
Unfortunately, the forecast of Trendfocus did not say how much longer the world would have to live with horrendously inflated platter spinner prices. Then again, previous rumors already agree, to some extent, that pre-flood quotes will be attained only in the third or fourth quarter of 2012.