IDC Finds that HDDs Might Still Reemerge, Sales-Wise

Much has been said about the hard disk drive market and how it might start to seriously decline because of solid state drives, but IDC believes such products can once again start to grow as a market.

SSDs have been getting steadily more affordable on the consumer market, giving hard drives a fairly hard time, or at least not painting a pretty picture ahead for platter-spinners.

Then again, HDDs themselves have been getting much more capacious, to the point where even 4 TB units now roam the market.

Still, HDD sales have been slowing down, making many people believe that it won't be too long before they lose their spot on the mainstream.

IDC, however, believes that this sort of storage device can enter another episode of significant growth, from a marketing standpoint.

More specifically, over the next five years, public and private cloud storage infrastructures will expand, while consumer and small business demand for personal cloud storage devices will increase.

This, along with better adoption of storage devices meant to boost PC speed, may set the stage for a new HDD sales surge, causing revenue to rise from $33.4 billion in 2010 to $48.2 billion in 2015.

"The HDD industry needs to shift its R&D priorities, giving more attention to developing faster HDD performance for PC markets while simultaneously delivering HDD capacity advancements to support enterprise storage growth demands," said John Rydning, research director for Storage Mechanisms: Disk.

"At the same time, HDD vendors have an opportunity to transform into storage solution providers with a broad range of products that address the needs of both consumers and small businesses."

HDD average selling prices (ASPs) are currently declining, but this process might slow down once vendors end up unable to reduce the material cost, at least on the short term.

As for the long terms, hybrid devices (HDDs with some NAND memory) might contribute to a new episode of platter-based storage unit sales. Either way, the HDD industry will have to reorganize its priorities somewhat if it is to grow again.