Analyst: HDDs to reach 6TB in 2012

Although all major HDD manufacturers have had to deal with dropping revenue in 2008, things will get better for them, but after the industry suffers for another couple of years, some analysts predict.

The first half of 2008 saw solid HDD shipments, but the second half of the year was troublesome. The trend is likely to continue while the global economy struggles.

“PCs (desktop and laptop) are the biggest users of HDDs, and there are reasonable projections that total PCs [sales] will decline by at least 5 percent in 2009,” Coughlin Associates principal analyst Tom Coughlin said in his Digital Storage Technology Newsletter.  “Consumer electronics products that use flash are expected to decline by 7 percent or more in 2009 over 2008. In general, digital storage device demand will suffer along with demand for the products that use them.”

Despite solid state drives (SSDs) continuing to make progress — both increasing in size and dropping in price — HDDs will continue to dominate, as they are still cheaper and obviously more popular among consumers as well as businesses.

“It looks like a 40-50 percent annual capacity growth rate in the last three years,” Coughlin also said.  “I project a 3 TB drive by 2010 and a 6TB by 2012.  In 2009, we will see 2.5-inch drives with 600 or 700+ GB and 1.8-inch drives with a capacity of 300GB or more.”

With some analysts predicting that it will still be years before SSDs are able to dent the stranglehold HDD has on the storage market, it is possible we’ll have massive 6TB drives before long.  Furthermore, if pricing trends continue the same way it is going, a 3TB drive could still be cheaper than a 1TB or smaller SSD. Consumers are likely to heavily support the cheaper format.

Even if SSDs are able to get more marketshare over the next two years, it’s possible that both formats will be able to coexist with one another, which will give consumers the ultimate advantage when selecting a storage solution.