HDDs to Be a Prime Present from Santa This Year

Since the consumer market always spends a lot during the holidays, on presents or any other supplies, it makes sense to assume that the IT industry will thrive, and a certain part of it appears to be quite ready to reap the benefits of the Santa Claus syndrome.

It would appear that, despite all the claims that solid state drives are cannibalizing the market share of hard disk drives, the latter will have very happy holidays indeed.

With all the new SSDs coming out, and with higher speeds and capacities, some have begun to wonder how long it will take for them to replace HDDs outright.

Apparently, if it will happen, it won't be soon, or at least not this year, considering how HDD shipments are actually going to grow sequentially during Q4.

iSuppli found that HDD shipments will reach about 169.2 million units during the October-December period of 2010.

This will imply a growth of 2.2% over the 165.5 million of the third quarter, while revenue will increase to $8.9 billion, by 2.1% as it were.

“The fourth-quarter increases in HDD shipments and revenue reflect positive developments on several fronts, including the stabilization of prices, strong demand from the enterprise segment and a return to normal inventory levels,” said Fang Zhang, analyst for storage systems at iSuppli.

Basically, the hard disk drive market has done quite well during the second half of the year, compared to the first and second quarters at least.

For those that want more specifics, Seagate will lead Q4 sales with a sum of $3.8 billion (up 3.7% over the $2.7 billion in Q3), followed by Western Digital with $2.4 billion (just 0.2 percent more than Q3's $2.39 billion).

All in all, HDDs are still very much the main choice on both the enterprise and consumer market when it comes to storage.