Hard disk drives experience record growth

The global hard-disk drive (HDD) market experienced a record-breaking year in both revenue and shipments during 2005, with shipments set to exceed 3bn units by 2010, according to an IDC report.

The analyst report found that last year revenue from the HDD market was $27.9bn, breaking a 1997 record of $27.8bn. Also, global HDD unit shipments increased by 24.4 per cent in 2005 compared to 2004 to nearly 381m drives.

John Rydning, research manager for HDD and components at IDC, said: "Over the next several years the industry is poised to surpass the records set in 2005, even in the midst of difficult technology transitions."

IDC also discovered that 2005 saw the world's first shipments of perpendicular recording drives, together with the world's largest capacity drive of 500GB's respectively.

The analyst predicted that, up until 2010, the 3.5 inch form factor will continue to provide the highest unit shipment volumes of any HDD form factor and desktop-class drives will continue to generate significant shares of revenue for the market.

"Competing storage technologies will challenge certain small form factor disk drives, but data growth will increase the demand for higher capacity disk drives in traditional form factors," added Rydning.

Gerard Marlow, business development manager at distributor Hammer, said its own business plan reflected IDC's figures.

"Last year was a great year and 2006 has been a very good year so far. Centralised data management, compliance and disaster recovery are just some of the factors helping to create this boom," he said.

james_sherwood@vnu.co.uk

Further reading

Hard disk drive market has best year yet

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