The outlook looks good for the worldwide hard disk drive (HDD) and solid state drive (SSD) industries as demand for storage remains strong in multiple areas.
Despite both markets being affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, the outlook looks good for the worldwide hard disk drive (HDD) and solid state drive (SSD) industries as demand for storage remains strong in multiple areas, according to a new report by International Data Corp. (IDC). Worldwide HDD industry petabyte shipments are expected to see a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.5% over the 2020–2025 forecast period and average capacity per drive is forecast to increase at a five-year CAGR of 25.5%.
“While the client HDD market continues a long-term secular decline due to rising SSD attach rates, the COVID-19 pandemic has over the near term increased the demand for certain types of HDDs, particularly mobile HDDs as well as capacity-optimized HDDs,” said Edward Burns, research director, Hard Disk Drive and Storage Technologies at IDC. “And the demand for storage capacity continues to grow at a steady pace as the world creates and stores more and more data.”
The COVID-19 pandemic impacted the various segments of the HDD market—enterprise storage systems, personal computers (PCs), personal and entry-level storage (PELS) devices, video surveillance systems, and consumer electronics products—in different ways.
Key trends in the worldwide HDD market include:
Like the HDD market, demand for SSDs continues to benefit from work- and school-from-home trends that have boosted demand for PCs. Higher SSD demand is also reflected in the enterprise market, as companies make the necessary investments in both cloud and traditional IT to support business operations.
“The pandemic has accelerated the need for transformation, and worldwide demand for SSDs has increased because of this trend as both consumers and businesses have looked to take advantage of the technologies’ benefits,” said Jeff Janukowicz, research vice president, Solid State Drives and Enabling Technologies at IDC. “IDC believes that most of the long-term trends remain intact, enabling broader SSD adoption over the forecast period, and worldwide SSD units and capacity shipped are higher than the prior forecast thanks to increasing demand from client devices, enterprise storage customers, and cloud service providers.”
IDC expects worldwide SSD unit shipments will increase at a 2020–2025 CAGR of 7.8% and worldwide SSD revenue will grow at a CAGR of 9.2% over the same period, reaching $51.5 billion in revenue by 2025. Worldwide SSD capacity shipments are expected to grow at a 2020–2025 CAGR of 33.0% as IDC expects ongoing price erosion in the long-term SSD pricing outlook.
Some key developments in the worldwide SSD market include: