14 DAY TRIAL // It would appear that market analysts are still very much at work, with iSuppli having published an announcement that states what it expects from the HDD industry for the first quarter of 2011.
It appears that, as IT players may or may not have feared, tablets are already having a significant enough effect on the notebook market that their and, by extension, their hardware sales will decrease.
One thing about slates is that, with very few exceptions, they all utilize NAND Flash chips when it comes to storage.
As such, every tablet sold is another notebook and, by extension, hard drive that stays in vendors' inventories.
Market research firm iSuppli decided to take a close look at just what this means for the HDD market as a whole, at least as far as the first quarter of 2011 goes.
What was found was that about 160.9 million units are set to be sold by the end of March, which implies a drop of 3.9% compared to the fourth quarter of 2010.
Of course, slates aren't the only reason behind this, as desktop PCs, netbooks and consumer electronics will also see slower sales, even though the year 2010 ended with an oversupply of 6 million to 8 million drives, something that should prompt an excess inventory burn-off.
“Tablets like Apple Inc.’s iPad represent a major threat to HDD demand,” said Fang Zhang, analyst for storage systems at IHS.
“Among the various computing segments in which HDDs are used, the netbook—with lower computing capabilities than either a desktop or laptop—is considered the most vulnerable to being supplanted by tablets, which do not use hard disks as storage media. And as tablet adoption gains momentum, netbooks will suffer even greater declines.”
What remains is to see how aggressive Western Digital and Seagate get in their ever existent battle over the top spot as worldwide HDD supplier.