Revenue is set to drop to an estimated US$ 32.7 billion in 2013, down 11.8 % from US$ 37.1 billion last year. HDD revenue will be flat, the following year, amounting to US$ 32.0 billion in 2014.
“Shipments for desktop PCs will slip this year, while notebook sales are under pressure as consumers continue to favor smartphones and tablets. The declining price of SSDs also will allow them to take away some share from conventional HDDs,” added he.
HDDs will still dominate external storage market, gunning their cost advantage over SSDs, particularly when higher densities are involved and dollars per gigabyte are calculated.
HDD costs and pricing are significantly lower than SSDs, and HDD average selling prices are expected to take another plunge this year by 7%.
Moreover, HDDs will continue to be part of storage solutions even in some low-end Ultrabook models that incorporate SSDs as a cache boot-up system for storing OS, while embedding HDDs as a large-scale data storage device.
The so-called hybrid solution, which cobbles hard disk drives together with a cache SSD module, sports a superior price-value proposition, compared to SSD-only counterparts.
A major growth area for HDDs will be in the business sector spanning the enterprise space, cloud storage, big data and big-data analytics.
Bearing the lowest cost of any storage medium now on the market, HDDs will remain the final destination for the majority of digital content that need to be filed away.
Toward the last quarter of this year, Western Digital is expected to launch a 5-terabyte Helium HDD, catering mostly to data centers for enterprise servers and storage applications, further propelling the HDD space into overdrive.
Western Digital vs. Seagate
Western Digital is expected to continue battling archrival Seagate Technology for market leadership in both revenue and shipments, especially in the enterprise business segment. While Seagate had a 50% share of the enterprise market last year, the introduction by Western Digital of its new helium technology could catapult the manufacturer to the top at the end of 2013, dethroning Seagate in the process.
(News Credit : IHS iSuppli)