While the market for SSDs nearly doubled in 2013, the entire storage market was down by 5% last year. The lower amount of computer storage devices shipped is mainly caused by declining demand for HDDs and optical disk drives (ODD), according to research company IHS Technology.
Where in 2012 the combined shipments of computer HDDs, SSDs and ODD amounted to 794 million units, in 2013 it dropped to 755 million in 2013. The amount of shipped SSDs was 57 million, which is a growth of 82%. HDD shipments were down 7% and ODD with 12%.
The decline in shipped HDDs is mainly caused by the increasing popularity of smartphones and tablets, which caused that especially HDDs for consumer PCs saw less units shipped. Nevertheless, IHS expects that the HDD demand will remain strong as enterprises start to refresh their PCs as the economy picks up. Also new technologies that allow for more data per HDD, thus cheaper storage, should continue to make HDDs an appealing choice.
The increase of shipments of SSDs is no surprise and the SSD industry is in aggressive expansion mode. Solid state disks are becoming cheaper and their advantages of increased performance and lower energy consumption all contribute to the increasing popularity. After the 82 percent increase of SSD shipments in 2013, IHS expects that SSD shipments will rise another 50 percent this year.
The ODD market continues to shrink partly caused by the increased popularity of streaming of music and video. Only Blu-ray has somewhat of a future, both CD and DVD drive shipments will continue to go down. IHS expects that by 2017, ODD shipments will be only 60% of the shipments in 2012.
