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Despite the impact of the global downturn on global markets, disk sales in the second quarter were 4 per cent higher than in the first.
Research numbers from IHS iSuppli showed 167.1 million drives were shipped in the quarter ending in June, compared to 160.5 million in the first quarter. The impact of the Japanese earthquake could have been a factor in the acceleration of shipments as suppliers stocked up as a hedge against shipment interruptions.
Thirty-two per cent of the market was claimed by Western Digital, with 31 per cent attributed to Seagate, the one-time and long-time leading shipper. Hitachi GST accounted for 16 per cent, with Toshiba/Fujitsu at 11 per cent, and tail-end Samsung at 10 per cent.
IHS iSuppli HDD shipment shares - Q2, 2011
Seagate is buying Samsung, which would give it a nominal 41 per cent; and WD is buying Hitachi GST, which would give it a nominal 48 per cent; leaving Toshiba with 11 per cent.
Although SSD shipments are edging up and will likely depress fast hard disk drive sales, a combination of factors – including the 15K drives, the need for consumer data stores, bulk data repositories for big data, and the continuing increase in storing backup data on disk – will probably drive continued disk drive shipment increases.
Over time though, it is expected that cloud data storage and continuing SSD use will begin to curtail disk drive shipment increases and then depress shipments. If cloud data is protected by service providers on tape rather than on disk, then this will happen sooner rather than later. ®
COMMENTS
You can have my DVDs, USB flash drive and Hard Disk Drive
If you can prise them from my cold, dead hands.
Cloud is just client/server computing, as it has always been, its just the workloads can now float between servers.
Its marketing BS.
The Reg puts the word cloud into every story because they are being paid big bucks to do so.
Aren't storage sales always guaranteed to increase?
I mean, we never really need less storage, do we? I've bought 5 drives in the past 6 months and they were the first drive purchases I'd made in more than 5 years.
Gosh, how speeds have improved!
Wow, I now have a 2TB drive where previously my largest was 300GB!
4TB drives announced from Seagate today, which means I will probably bag a 3TB drive when their price curve levels out at a nice, low level.
Everything is HD and 3D now, which takes up a bunch of storage. A 3TB drive or two will be most welcome in my household.
That's just consumer space. Businesses are processing ever more data, seeking ever faster IO. We may have hit a bit of a bump in the worldwide economy but that doesn't suddenly mean we need less storage. Probably more, to store all the data about failed companies...
It's simple...
Magnetic storage is here to stay for a long time.
4 years ago there was the push for flash disks in 'business laptops' we say 16 32 and 64 Gbyte flash storage (you can't call those 'drives') in 2.5 inch formfactor. After that it petered out until MLC came along to push SLC out of the way. But price is still high.
Then came the Tablet boom. 16 or 32 Gbyte and no longer in 2.5 inch format. Meanwhile the demand for flash for ipod / iphone and other smartphones has eroded the price further to 2$/gbyte ( 2 years ago ). Still a steep ticket compaerd to classic magnetic storage.
And now comes another gamechanger : the cloud. Your local machine ( whether tablet or notebook ) no longer needs oodles of storage. Just enough for the OS , some apps and some local data so you can work 'offline'. The rest is stored 'in the cloud'.
Now, let's take a look at this cloud shall we. You used to have your colection of thousands of family pictures/ video / whatever on one drive in one computer. We shift to the cloud : these pictures are replicated on multiple datacenters , multiple drives.. ( possibly a raid system ) So your data now resides in multiple copies on multiple disks. Previously 1 drive , now many more ...
And a lot of people start using 'mini' clouds like a home server or net disk.
So the demand for drives is going up, while the demand for increasing flash is going down ...
The demand for notebook disks and, to a lesser extent desktop disks, may go down ; but server storage is going up drastically. Furhtermore there is no further price erosion in flash since nobody asks for large capacity. All you need is bootvolume and temporary storage. This has an impact on the price of harddisk replacements: those prices don:t drop.. so they remain unattractive from that point of view. Also the size increase is not there. you don;t need 64 or 128 for the bootvolume and temp storage. you can perfectly live with 16 or 32... the rest will be sucked in from the cloud or even worse : streaming. There is no need to storae anything locally. click and it comes... but it comes from magnetic storage.
And there is more. Datacenters manage the physically wear out drives. Simply because the headstack is almost nonstop in motion. These drives will need replacement ...
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