ISuppli: Hard drive market continues to shrink large data applications into important markets

With the impact of tablets, smartphones and solid-state drives, the global hard disk market in 2013 was down 12% from 2012. 2013 sales are expected to be 32.7 billion U.S. dollars, and 2012 is 37.1 billion U.S. dollars, 2014 will continue to shrink to 32 billion U.S. dollars.

Fang Zhang, IHS Storage systems analyst, said: The 2013 HDD industry will face enormous challenges. Desktop PCs will be shipped down and laptops will be hit by smartphones and tablets. SSD prices continue to fall, which will also take away a portion of the hard drive market.

As prices fall, the profits of hard drives continue to decrease. But hardware still dominates the storage market.

Hard drive vs. SSD

Hard drives have higher densities and lower unit capacity prices, and this year's HDD prices are expected to drop by 7% per cent year-on-year. The main areas of growth in the hard disk market are in commercial enterprises, including cloud storage, large data and large data analysis.

The Western data will launch a 5TB helium-filled hard drive (helium HDD), a data center that supports enterprise applications and storage, and will further drive technological innovation.

Western Data vs. Seagate

Western data will continue to compete with Seagate, especially in the enterprise-level market. Last year, Seagate accounted for 50% of the corporate-class market. According to the western data, their helium-filled hard drive technology will be available to manufacturers at the end of 2013.