Hard Drive Shipments Back on Record Track After Thai Floods

The hard drive industry has shed the impact of the catastrophic Thailand flood last year and has fully recovered, IHS reports.

The market research firm believes that total 2012 HDD shipments will be 524.0 million units, up from 502.5 million in 2011. The industry is, according to IHS, poised for strong growth and will sell 575.1 million drives in 2016. This number only includes shipments into the PC and market, but not drives shipped into the automotive market, for external drives, or consumer electronics such as DVRs.

"HDD shipments for computers will overcome a sluggish third quarter to reach record levels in 2012," said Fang Zhang, analyst for storage systems at IHS.

"The yearly rise in HDD shipments is the result of greater demand from the consumer and enterprise PC segments, both of which continue to clamor for disk space in order to hold storage-intensive media like music, videos and other forms of social media content," he said. "As downloadable media content becomes more readily accessible and affordable, so will the quest for storage space continue in order to satisfy unremitting demand."

Potential growth driver for hard drive sales will be Windows 8, as well as compact notebook from factors such as Ultrabooks.

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