HHD Manufactures Expect Growth in 2012

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC (News - Alert)), a self-proclaimed predictor of business futures, the HHD industry is set to rebound in 2012. The IDC predicting 7.7-percent growth, which would more than make up for the losses experienced by most hard disk manufactures in the last year.

2011 was a difficult year for hard disk drive (HHD) manufacturers worldwide. Encroaching competition from solid state drives (SSD) and two natural disasters disrupted the industry to the tune of a 4.5-percent decline. Mother Nature and competitor innovation is combination most industries would fear, but things are looking up for HHD providers.

"The hard disk drive industry has collectively hit the 'reset' button,” said John Rydning, research vice president of Hard Disk Drives at IDC. “A reset of the HDD industry structure should allow the remaining HDD industry participants to slowly reduce HDD prices from current levels at a rate that still delivers value to customers, while at the same time ensuring sufficient funding is available to develop new HDD capacity, performance, reliability, power consumption and security.

“Still, long-term-revenue growth will only be realized if the remaining participants transform into storage device and storage solution suppliers with a broad range of products for a wide variety of markets," he added.

Growth of cloud storage and cloud computing, according to Rydning, has opened the door to SSD technology in corporate and personal computing applications. SSDs are, for most businesses, too small and too expensive for wide spread deployment. But in combination with a cloud-based solution to enterprise software and storage, they could find an opening and steal more market share from HHD companies.

The race is really about price of traditional HHDs and the size of SSD's. If SSDs can reach a capacity level that consumers are comfortable purchasing, HHDs could go endangered. SSDs have several advantages over HHD's, but the latter currently wins in price and capacity. Unless that changes, the HHD industry should indeed rebound this year.