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.
If it weren't for this FIASCO we would have 4TB for $79 by now.
Prices haven't been "normal" for quite a while now. I assume you mean production levels?
While prices are still inflated, they are dropping back to normal. For a while my store couldn't get any 320GB HDDs. We have them again finally. And 2TBs are $99 which isn't too bad.
They will decline steadily again and we will see better prices in the coming months.
i bought a 1TB western digital caviar black 64mb cache 7200 rpm 2 years ago for $79 at a retail store.
right now it's $110 with $8 shipping on newegg
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136533
on the other hand SSD prices have dropped nearly $200 and a 120GB SSD can be had for $79 now
the same thing happened with gas prices....now we are used to paying over 4 dollars for a gallon of gas....this is really sad
They will as long as they don't sell the volumes they make, supply and demand...
And it seems they still have another 2 more years of milking to go. At least it gave ample time for SSD's to come down in price thanks to the higher prices making them more attractable for a workstation drive.
In the meantime I'm forcing myself from a much needed upgrade on the external for over a year and probably another before the inflated price isn't such a kick in the gut. Bad timing the floods hit a month prior to my scheduled upgrade. If money only grew on trees.