A new study indicates hard disk drive growth will continue to increase through 2014, with the rise of solid-state drives expected to take a longer time to mature.
The new IDC "Worldwide Hard Disk Drive 2010-2014 Forecast" expects HDD purchases for the enterprise to increase from 40.5 million in 2009 up to a predicted 52.6 million units in four years.
"The big story here is that there is simply a lot of content growth, and when you look at this worldwide, and how much of that has to be stored, hard drives are still unbeatable, in terms of delivering the best storage device for the money," noted John Rynding, IDC storage director, noted in an interview with eWEEK.
The decline of the global economy temporarily slowed down enterprise spending, but cloud-based services are continuing to increase. In total, more than 300,000 petabytes of storage will be available by 2014, according to IDC, with more HDD storage shipping in the next two years than the past 20 years total.
Hitachi and Western Digital both saw strong earnings or profit from their HDD businesses, even though it wasn't long ago some companies seemed anxious working in the market. Hitachi, WD, Seagate and Samsung will be called upon to manufacture even more 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch HDDs that can be used in the enterprise and consumer markets.
SSDs are popular because they're more reliable and should have a longer lifespan than HDDs, but they are much more expensive and have slower write speeds than traditional HDDs.
